


The Last Four Years

by damnslippyplanet



Series: Averno [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Emotional Idiots In Love, Established Relationship, Is Slow Murder Burn a thing?, Let's Say It Is, M/M, Murder Husbands Probably Gonna Murder, Murder aftercare, eventually, globe-trotting murder husbands, literal curtain fic, murder fluff, puppies!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-03 20:15:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 27
Words: 47,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5305355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will and Hannibal have finally (finally!) managed to get together in the same time and place, without anyone trying to shoot at them or arrest them.  Which doesn't necessarily mean anything about navigating their new life together is going to be easy.  There might still be one or two tiny little issues left to work out.</p><p>Other than a little flash-forward at the very beginning, this follows on linearly picking up right after the previous chunk of story, <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4960567/chapters/11390896">What We Talk About When We Talk About Blood</a>.  It's not absolutely essential to have read that one first, though.</p><p>On temporary hiatus right now for <a href="http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com/post/143343331801/got-a-couple-of-questions-recently-about-the">wonky brain reasons</a> but is NOT abandoned, I promise, I will finish this story if I have to do it from my deathbed which, hopefully, will not be the case.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Последние четыре года](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6829240) by [Setchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setchi/pseuds/Setchi)



_Four Years after Maine; Copenhagen_

It’s a chilly day and Will wraps his scarf around his neck snugly. It’s the same old scarf, the blue one from the time before. Hannibal keeps threatening to replace it but Will won’t let him. 

He breathes on his hands for a moment to warm them, then shoves them back in his pocket and quickens his step. He’s just seen the man he’s following turn left at the street corner, off onto a side street. It’s going to be harder to follow there, less foot traffic, easier to be spotted. He considers his options for a moment and then keeps going.

He follows for a few more blocks as the pedestrian traffic grows sparser and then decides he’s too exposed to keep going. Not when he’s not sure he really wants to do anything about this. When this is all just theoretical, albeit a theory he’s been turning over in his mind for quite a while. 

Besides, he needs to get the groceries home before Hannibal gets cranky about not having everything he needs for the perfect dinner. God forbid dinner be imperfect. Some things don’t change.

Will watches his quarry vanish out of sight and then turns and heads back toward the car. He tucks the shopping bag he’s holding in with his other purchases, then drives out of the city toward the vacation home they’ve rented for the month. Sometimes in their travels they like to stay in the heart of cities; this time, Hannibal’s chosen something more out of the way. More private. 

Will isn’t entirely sure whether he just wants the seclusion, or whether he had something more practical in mind. He wonders idly whether somewhere there’s a website that traffics in vacation rentals for killers. _Secluded romantic hideaway an easy drive to the city; two car garage with plenty of room for body disposal; easy-to-clean linoleum._ That shouldn’t be funny. It really shouldn’t.

The phone rings when he’s a few miles out and he answers on speakerphone. “I’m on my way. The shops were a disaster. And I ended up with the one clerk who doesn’t speak English, or pretends not to, so someone else had to help me - it turned into a whole thing.”

“I don’t think there’s a clerk in Denmark who doesn’t speak English, Will. It’s mandatory in the schools.”

“I found the only one. Maybe he was home-schooled.” Hannibal sighs so loud Will can hear it through the car speakers, can imagine the expression that goes with it, and he smiles fondly. “Don’t be too mad. I tracked down every single one of your requests, eventually. I’ll be home in twenty minutes.” He hangs up before Hannibal can give him a long lecture on the various cheeses he was tasked with bringing home.

Will makes it home in exactly eighteen minutes, unloads the car, and makes his way into the rental house. Coming home when they’re on vacation is always so odd, so quiet without the dogs. He suspects Hannibal enjoys the temporary reprieves from fur and slobbering.

He lets the smells from the kitchen lure him in exactly like the cartoons he used to watch as a child, imagining a beckoning finger of irresistible aromas lifting him from the ground and wafting him along the hallway. When he reaches the kitchen he pauses in the doorway to enjoy the show for a few minutes. This never stops being one of his favorite things to watch, no matter how many critically acclaimed plays, operas, or ballets they attend together. He’d pretty much always rather stay home and watch Hannibal cook for him.

This looks like a particularly elaborate production, several different pots bubbling away, scents coming from the oven, a few dishes piled up in the sink in contrast to Hannibal’s usual care to wash up as he goes. He turns to Will with a smile and brushes an over-long strand of hair out of his eyes with the back of a flour-covered hand and Will melts a little, again, always. He drops the groceries on the counter and presses himself tight against Hannibal’s back, arms around his waist.

For the time being he’s forgotten all about the man he’s seriously considering letting Hannibal kill, lost in the sheer delight of being home. He smiles and says, “There’s all the damn cheese you could ever want. Do your own shopping next time if you want it done quickly. Or teach me how to say “give me the most pretentious cheese you have” in Danish. Happy anniversary, love.”

********************

_Two Weeks After Maine: Rosario_

Will lingers in the steamy bathroom for a while, towelling himself dry, stretching delicious aches from his muscles and giving Hannibal a chance to miss him for a few minutes longer. Eventually he returns to the bedroom, gathers up discarded items of yesterday’s clothing strewn about the room as if a tornado had cut a path through the closets, and drops everything in the hamper before finding clean clothes. 

It’s still far too early for conversations about chore divisions but he occasionally feels slightly guilty about the terrible mess he persists in making of Hannibal’s--their--bedroom. Not that guilty, and there’ve been no complaints, given the activities that tend to lead to the clothing tornados, but he doesn’t want to start taking any of this for granted. It’s too hard won.

Clean and dressed, he wanders into the dining room to find breakfast laid out. Hannibal’s waited to eat, but he’s well into a mug of coffee, newspaper spread out, still mussed and rumpled, tanned and longer-haired, everything and nothing like the Hannibal Will first met all those years ago. Just because he can, he drops a kiss to the back of Hannibal’s neck before saying,“Thank you for breakfast.”

“How long are you going to keep thanking me for breakfast?”

“As long as you’re going to make it for me.” 

Hannibal looks pleased. He always looks pleased, since Will arrived. Will wonders how long the honeymoon stage is supposed to last when it starts this many years into two people knowing each other and when they had to spill and cross this many oceans of blood to get to it. He guesses that “supposed to” doesn’t really apply to the two of them, never really did and probably never will. 

He makes inroads into breakfast before asking, “What are we doing today? Do you still want to start showing me around the city?”

“I thought maybe tomorrow.”

Will doesn’t bother to hide a smirk. “You said that yesterday. And the day before that. Don’t you have to get back to work at some point?”

“One of the advantages my antiques have over psychiatric practice is that they can be left unattended for extended periods of time without calling me in the middle of the night in crisis. My clients can survive without my opinion of their dusty attic findings for the summer.”

That surprises Will and he glances up sharply from his breakfast. “The summer?”

“The summer. I’m taking a sabbatical of sorts.” There’s the smugness again. “Assuming you do not object to extra time in my presence.”

Will doesn’t object. He’s achingly aware of the fragility of their situation, in the moments when he can get enough clarity from the fog of giddiness and relief and sex to think about it rationally. They could be recognized tomorrow and in custody by next week. They may, when they come down from this honeymoon period, drive each other crazy and realize none of this was ever going to work. One of them may end up leaving. One of them may end up stabbing the other; it’s an outside chance at this point but not one he’s completely able to discount. 

This, right now, might be all they have. The last scraps of spring and then a single summer before reality sets in. He’ll take a summer. “No objections.”

“Then we have time. I’ll show you the city. I’ll show you the countryside. I’ll show you anything you wish. Tomorrow. Let’s stay home today.” Hannibal turns back to his newspaper.

Will doesn’t hide his pleased smile. He came so far to get here, where else could he possibly need to go? They’ll stay home, then. 

He’ll finish breakfast and do the dishes and then go outside for a walk in the sun. He’s too pale from a winter in Maine, he’ll stand out if they ever actually leave the house unless he gets a little color. He’ll start making a list of things he needs to buy when they eventually do go into the city. He’ll make the list in Spanish, for practice. In the afternoon and evening they’ll spend time together making dinner and love and elaborate plans for things to do the next day. And then the next day, most likely, they won’t do any of those things.

It sounds like a good way to spend a summer.


	2. Chapter 2

_Two Months: Rosario_

“What part of ‘I’m not moving a fucking muscle’ did you not understand?” Will’s pretty sure he spoke clearly - he’s lying stomach down on the grass but he’s got his face turned to one side, resting on his folded arms.

“The part where you were rude when I offered you the pleasure of my company for a drive.” Will can’t actually see Hannibal; he’s backlit by the warm sun. But he can tell by the voice Hannibal is amused, not actually annoyed. He likes Will impertinent.

“I wasn’t rude, I’m just comfortable here and you’re being pushy. And I thought you like it when I say ‘fuck’. Don’t get prissy on me now, Doctor Lecter.”

“Context is everything. What’s charming in our bedroom may be less charming on the lawn.”

Will lifts his head slightly and offers what he hopes is his most charming smile. Hannibal pretty much set himself up for this one. “You weren’t so concerned about context and appropriate locations on the balcony yesterday. Or for that matter, last week at the--”

_“C’est un enfant terrible_.” 

_“Tu te souviens que je parle francais, cher_?” 

“Abominably. Your accent is atrocious.”

“My accent is fine in Louisiana. You’re just a snob. And you’re blocking my sun. You’re the one who said more sunlight would do me good.”

Hannibal grumbles but moves off to the side, leaving the sun warm on Will’s back again, before continuing. “I’ll be gone a few hours. You could come for the ride and walk around a bit while I meet with Elaine.”

“Elaine with the antique side table emergency that necessitates breaking your sabbatical.” Will tries not to let any hint of jealousy creep through in his tone. Hannibal’s allowed to have clients, and in fact Will’s rather looking forward to having a few hours to himself. He just also wonders, maybe, a little bit, what makes Elaine so special that she gets to intrude into their time. 

“Elaine with the side table emergency, yes. You can come meet her if you like. I just thought you’d prefer to go exploring.”

Will rolls onto his back, holds out a hand, and lets Hannibal help him up. Some of his injuries are still a little stiff and he’s not moving as easily as he once did. Hannibal claims he’ll get most of the movement back, with continued physiotherapy and massage treatment. Will suspects the massage part is mostly an excuse for contact, but doesn’t let on that he knows. The massages are nice even if they don’t seem to make any significant difference to his mobility.

“I’m going to pass on the antique emergency. Go into town. Let me make dinner for a change while you’re gone. I’ll have it ready when you get back, and you’ll have a chance to miss me.”

Before Hannibal can protest again, Will flows into his arms, pointedly showing no concern about the grass stains he’s probably pressing into Hannibal’s good clothing, and kisses him hard enough to last for a few hours. Or at least he does his best in that regard and so far he hasn’t received any complaints about his best. 

Hannibal apparently knows when he’s beaten, and acquiesces moderately gracefully to leaving Will alone for the afternoon, and to turning over his kitchen for dinner. 

When he leaves, Will listens to the purr of the car engine fading in the distance and then settles back into the grass on his back, sun warm and bright against his eyelids. He’ll go inside in a bit and clean up and plan dinner, but not just yet.

For now, he slides back into the river in his mind, where he was visiting with Abigail before the interruption. She’s right where he left her, line in the water, watching and waiting. He was with her in the river before but now he’s on the bank, close enough to speak with her while she fishes. 

He watches her for a moment and then asks, “Do you notice when I’m gone? Are you still...here...when I’m not?”

“You’re feeling metaphysical today.” She smiles at him. “As far as I know, I’m here all the time. But how would I know if I weren’t?”

_Enfant terrible_ , indeed. Will’s heart snags and tears as readily as any fish Abigail might catch. He hides it in the motion of moving to sit on a nearby rock. As much as he can hide anything from Abigail. 

“Fair enough. Sorry for the metaphysics. It’s just, I worry about you. That you’ll go away.”

“If you get too happy and forget about me.” She glances up at him shrewdly and then starts to reel in her line. “If you forget to visit me. If you don’t need me anymore.”

“Something like that.” He’s barely thought about her in the past few weeks. A pang, every once and again, when something reminds him of her. But otherwise, he’s been too wrapped up in the newness of his life in Argentina. In the novelty of _having_ Hannibal, not just a voice on a phone line, but the overwhelming entirety of Hannibal in his life from sunup to sundown, available to every one of his senses. There’s been so little else that he needed; he’d have gone without food, sleep, or air if Hannibal hadn’t periodically reminded him of the need for all three. He’s never been so submerged in something he had so little desire to find his way out of. 

Abigail lets out a most undignified snort of laughter. “Oh, boy. You’ve got it bad. I thought you were moony enough _before_.”

Will tosses a pebble near enough to splash her just a little, in retaliation. “Shush. I’m not moony. You’re the one who said I should make a choice and be happy. Just...don’t go away, okay?”

Wind in her hair, sun in her eyes, his Abigail cocks her head to the side and grins. “Don’t worry. When you need me again I’ll be here. Don’t rush it. Happy looks good on you.”

Will suspects that what looks good on him is two straight months of restful sleep, sunshine, Hannibal’s cooking, staggeringly frequent and increasingly excellent sex, nothing to poke at his anxieties, and not a single obligation to do anything but what pleases him. It would be hard for that not to look good on anyone. But maybe it’s the happiness too. He can’t discount the theory. He shrugs and grins.

“I should go. This may be the only afternoon I have to myself for another two months, I intend to enjoy it to its fullest. I’ll come back soon. Wait for me.”

“What else would I do?” She dismisses him with a little flip of her hand. He stays to watch her cast again, beautifully, a clean smooth arc through the air. He doesn’t stay to see if she’ll catch anything. She will, if she wants to; the world in his head bends itself that way for her. To give her everything it can of what was taken away. She’ll have everything she needs until he comes back again.

He brushes grass from his shorts and heads inside to take stock of his dinner options.

 

_Three Months: Rosario_

It’s possible the nightmares have been going on for a while before Will becomes aware of them. Maybe there are other nights Hannibal’s woken up first. But on this particular night, Will wakes to an unfamiliar sound and before his mind has consciously processed something’s wrong he’s upright, scanning the room. 

The sound comes again and Will drops his eyes to Hannibal. His face is a grimace, hair a mess, fist tight in the bedsheets like he’s trying to hold something, or push something away. It’s a startling sight; he hasn’t known Hannibal to dream. He’s mentioned childhood night terrors in passing, but hasn’t indicated they ever recur.

Hannibal usually sleeps quiet, still, curled around Will protectively and possessively. Making up for years’ worth of solitary nights and touch starvation. The reassuring weight of him in their bed anchors Will’s own sleep, which is mostly easy now, his dreams occasionally melancholy but rarely terrifying.

“Hannibal. Hey.” He tries a gentle hand on Hannibal’s shoulder and that doesn’t work, so he slides down until they’re face to face and places a hand on his partner’s cheek. “Hannibal.” Louder, now. “It’s okay. Come back to me. Wake up.” 

He moves his hand to cover Hannibal’s where it’s clenching the sheets, and slowly as Hannibal wakes, he lets the sheets go and takes Will’s hand instead. He looks dazed, not quite back from wherever he’d gone, and Will murmurs low and soothing nonsense until Hannibal is back with him properly. “Hey. I’m here. You’re okay now. Can I get you something? Water? Anything?”

Hannibal shakes his head and moves to fit himself into the curve of Will’s body, an inversion of their usual sleeping position. He moves in close, like he wants to press through Will’s skin, past blood and bone, to rest in the safe harbor of Will’s ribcage. But he says only, “I’m all right. Don’t go anywhere.”

Will knows suddenly and piercingly that he left. Somewhere in the depths of Hannibal’s dreaming mind, Will left Hannibal alone. 

He’s filled with an absurd desire to apologize for something he didn’t actually do. With the realization that if Hannibal’s started having nightmares now, it’s because he suddenly has something to fear losing. He wonders when the last time was, before this, that Hannibal felt actual fear. He suspects it’s been a long time.

Will stays awake long after Hannibal’s drifted back to sleep. He watches in the dark, listening for sounds of feathers or hooves, something he can chase away from Hannibal. Something he can do other than feeling helpless and guilty.

After that the nightmares come somewhat regularly, maybe twice a month. Will wakes for most of them. He does his best to gentle Hannibal back to sleep. 

Sometimes the nightmares don’t wake Will, but he can still tell they’ve been there. On the mornings after, Hannibal never talks about it but he takes Will hard and fast with no hint of the sleepy gentleness more common to their mornings. There are always marks, teeth and nails, a claiming. There’s always a desperation to it: _Stay_. 

Will bends for Hannibal gladly for this as for everything else. He says it over and over every way he can, in their bed and out of it, with words and actions: _I’ll stay if you will. I’m here with you_. 

The nightmares still come but he hopes in time they’ll ease. When Hannibal sees that Will intends to stay. 

_My whole life. Our whole lives. What could I ever go looking for, when we have this? Sleep, love_.

Night after night, Will stands watch over Hannibal's dreams. He never quite sees the stag in their bedroom but sometimes he feels it somewhere just out of sight. Hooves, hot breath, something waiting in the dark corners of their otherwise sunlit life.


	3. Chapter 3

_Five Months: Rosario_

Hannibal goes back to work in September. He doesn't have anything approaching a regular work schedule, but he's often gone. Will doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. Part of him desperately misses their day-in-and-day-out closeness, but he also luxuriates in the great open stretches of hours when their home is silent and his time is entirely his own to spend or waste.

He coaxes the garden into life, enjoying the novelty of living somewhere gardens aren’t well into their death throes by early September. He tries hard not to think about Eldon Stammets when he sinks his hands into newly-tilled earth, or to see Sheldon Isley behind his eyes when flowers bloom, and most days he succeeds.

On the days when he doesn’t succeed, when the past rises in him like a tidal wave, Will presses his fingers into the grass and breathes and tries to let it roll through him and out again. He escapes to the river, sometimes, when the breathing and grounding exercises aren’t enough. He feels more stable now than he has in years, ironically enough, especially when Hannibal is there to ground him, but he still has bad moments.

He takes up running again, when the aches in his abused bones allow. He runs longer and farther each week and rolls his eyes endlessly at Hannibal’s stupid puns about him being on the run. He does his physical therapy exercises and his muscles slowly begin to unknit around his injuries until his movements become something close to free again. 

He lets Hannibal draw him endlessly out of his head and into his body, into his skin, into his senses, over and over, until the simplest words and glances leave him crackling with desire. For someone who never really knew how to touch, Will finds himself unable to keep his hands to himself. Neither of them are particularly displeased with this development.

He practices his Spanish on store clerks and waiters, getting better, although he’ll never be mistaken for a native by any means. He’s not really even good enough yet to get or hold down a job, which drives him a little crazy since he’s been making his own way in the world his whole life. To make himself feel useful he takes to spending some of his time helping Hannibal attend to his business. 

Will has no patience for endless sorting through estate sales or haggling over prices, but he has a good eye for what restoration work a piece may need. His remarkable memory sometimes manages to pull up a fact about a period or a style that even Hannibal doesn’t know. It’s good to feel useful again. 

Some of Hannibal’s customers even come to appreciate the rather more understated taste of Hannibal’s…business associate? They’re never quite sure what term to use. Hannibal (Andreas, here at work) inevitably responds to these polite pauses and uncertainties with a shark’s grin and a pointed: “Partner.”

If he thinks the message isn’t getting across, or doesn’t like the attention one of his clients is paying Will, he tends to get a little handsy. It’s terribly unprofessional. Like so many other things, Will shouldn’t like it. And yet. He finds he cares less and less about “should.” 

On the days when he’s not assisting Hannibal and doesn’t feel like working or running outside, Will reads and fixes things around the house. He watches terrible TV that he claims, when Hannibal teases him, is entirely for the purposes of practicing his Spanish. He eats furtive slapped-together lunches that Hannibal would never approve of and sometimes he leaves the evidence around the kitchen just to see how appalled Hannibal can get.

Sometimes, on the bad days, Will finds himself at the computer searching the internet. Sometimes he’s looking for news about the two of them; he breathes a small sigh of relief when Hannibal slips down a notch or two on the Most Wanted list. Not that there’s really any functional distance between number three and number four, but somehow it lets him pretend Hannibal might one day slip off that list altogether and be allowed to vanish so thoroughly they can stop looking over their shoulders. 

As far as he can tell, there’s no one officially looking for Will Graham anywhere - grown men are allowed to slip off the grid if they want to. But he suspects unofficially someone’s looking. At the very least, someone’s wondering.

Other days he searches for Molly and Walter, Alana and Margot, the families his dogs went to live with. There’s not much to see and as the weeks go by the desire to poke at these particular losses fades in its urgency like a healing bruise. Left behind doesn’t mean unimportant, lost doesn’t mean unloved, but he lets the losses sink to the bottom of his mind and rest there mostly undisturbed.

If Hannibal misses anyone or anything, or runs his own searches for anything other than signs that they’ve been tracked down, he never gives any sign. If he longs for the hunt or the kill, or the taste of more exotic meats than those he sources from local butcher shops, he doesn’t say. Will doesn’t ask; he knows it’s foolish to think of Hannibal’s darker impulses as some kind of fairytale bogeyman that might rise from the shadows if its name is spoken aloud, but he can’t help it. He just watches, and waits.

They go on weekend trips to see the country. Sometimes they experience marvelous things together: history, art, food. Sometimes they drive hours to some beautiful site only to hole up in a hotel for the weekend, forget all their carefully laid plans, and emerge days later entirely without regrets about not seeing a thing on their sightseeing trip that they couldn’t have seen in their own bedroom.

They are, as far as he can tell, which isn’t that far because anyone who’s ever dated him would tell you that Will Graham is no relationship expert, deliriously happy. Dangerously, unsustainably happy, perhaps.

He doesn’t mind trading the occasional sleepless night of guarding Hannibal’s dreams for the rest of this. He’s traded much more and done so willingly. He’d trade it all again if he had it to do over, although he’d try harder to protect others from the fallout.

They lie tangled together at night, on lazy mornings, afternoons when Will’s convinced Hannibal to skip another boring estate sale in favor of more entertaining pastimes, and Will traces Hannibal with his fingers. He draws delicate traceries of imaginary lines over every inch of Hannibal’s skin, protective designs, spells, wishes. _Let this last. Let the bluff crumble into the sea, let the wind take everything we were, only let me have this_. He takes Hannibal apart and puts him together again a thousand times, learning something new every time. He makes up new rules for Hannibal for the sheer delight of seeing how willingly Hannibal follows them, right up until he doesn't, and how sweet and blatantly false his apologies are afterwards.

And when Hannibal makes Will ask for what he wants, always one of his lover’s favorite games - _you can have anything, the sun and the stars and my heart ripped bleeding from my chest and served to you on china made from my bones, I'll do anything, anything in the world, but you have to ask for it_ \- all he can ever think of to ask for is _this. You. Everything, forever._ And at least for now, that’s what he has.

Whatever beasts lie under Hannibal’s skin and perhaps Will’s own, they appear to be willing to sleep, for a while. To allow Will and Hannibal this time. He wills them to stay asleep as long as they can.

_Eight Months: Rosario_

When he looks back on it later, Will’s surprised it took them so long to have an actual fight. They’ve both been on their best behavior, but even so, probably something should have snapped sooner. Which is probably why the argument feels worse than it actually is, small accumulated tensions of daily life getting mixed up in a conversation that has nothing to do with them.

He doesn’t even really fully realize it _is_ a fight that they’re having until he hears how loud his own voice is echoing back to him: “I’m not your pet, Hannibal! I don’t have to account for my time or ask permission to go out!”

“Is that another one of your _rules_ , Will?” And if he didn’t know they were having an argument before, he knows now, from the coiled dangerous purr in Hannibal’s voice. He wonders how they ended up on thin ice, so far out he can almost hear it cracking underneath him, without realizing it.

“Fuck the _rules_ ,” he hears himself all but snarling. He takes a deep breath and tries not to hyperventilate. Tries to walk this back. Resists the urge to ask if fucking _Bedelia_ had to account for her whereabouts in Florence every time _she_ decided to run an impromptu errand. “I expected to be back before you came home. I’d have called if I’d known you’d come home early. But you can’t freak out any time you don’t know where I am. You don’t get to keep me on a leash. That’s not how this works!” 

“If our lives were normal, no. I would assume you had gone for a walk, out to the store, to dinner. Our lives are _not_ normal and such assumptions are not possible. What was I to think? The FBI could have come for you. You could have left.” It would take someone who knew Hannibal very, very well to hear the emphasis on that last word, but Will knows Hannibal very, very well by now, in all his inflections and tensions and shivers and sighs. He hears it and the entire conversation suddenly makes sense, puzzle pieces clicking into place, and Will melts.

“Damn it, Hannibal.” He reaches out for Hannibal’s hand and touches unresponsive fingers. “That’s what this is? You’re not angry, you’re scared, and you apparently can’t tell the difference. God, for a psychiatrist, you are _awful_ at having feelings.” A slight twitch in the hand he’s taken. “And I’m sorry you’re stuck with me because I am almost as terrible at them as you are.”

Hannibal watches him, impassive, and doesn’t respond, but Will knows he’s right and he knows how to fix this.

“I’m going to go out and have a life sometimes without asking your permission first. And I’m going to come back to you every time. And if the FBI comes for me when you’re not here, you’ll know, because there’s no way I would let them take me away from you without taking a few of them down with me.” 

That gets him a response, an intertwining of Hannibal’s fingers with his own, but still silence, so he continues. “You would know they took me. You would _know_ , because this entire kitchen would be painted with blood and I’d have left you a trail of it to follow to come get me.”

His own voice sounds harsh and fierce in his ears. He didn’t know he was going to say that until he said it, and it turns his stomach a little. But he also knows every word is true. He doesn’t want to kill. But he would, if pressed, to keep this. Just because he hasn’t forced himself to put words to the thoughts until now, doesn’t mean they’re not true. He shudders slightly with the realization but tries not to show it.

He has a sudden mental image of himself, the kitchen, a body at his feet. All of them splattered with crimson, rivulets of blood running down his hands. He doesn't know if it's his own thought or something he's mirroring from Hannibal - those lines are so blurry now - but he knows his response to the image is not what it should be. He swallows, hard, and tries to focus on here and now, not on the sudden memory of a blood-drenched cliff top and of the way Hannibal had looked at him just before they fell. _Focus, Graham. You can get inappropriately turned on sometime when you're not trying to end a fight with someone who guts you when you hurt his feelings._

Hannibal stares at him for a long frozen minute and then blinks slowly once, twice, like a cat. Some of the tension melts from his shoulders as he considers Will. “I...may have overstepped my bounds. I’ve grown used to you being here when I get home. I was alarmed.”

 _Alarmed_. Hannibal Lecter, terrifying nightmare monster of several books and a particularly dreadful-looking made-for-TV movie that Will has so far refused to watch, can’t admit to _scared_. The panicky feeling in Will’s chest subsides and he smiles a small, rueful smile. “God. I’m in love with an emotional idiot. We’re going to have to -- what?” 

It’s the expression on Hannibal’s face that makes Will pause in mid-sentence. He’s seen that expression before. It’s something close to reverence, it makes Will feel uncomfortably like he’s Hannibal’s personal deity, and this seems like a very weird time for it.

“Say that again, please. I wish to remember it.”

“You’re an emotional idiot.”

“ _Will_.”

He replays the conversation for a moment, then gets it. “Oh. You’re an emotional idiot, and I love you. You know that. I’ve _said_ that.”

He’s pretty sure that in the pause between sentences, Hannibal is building a new room in some wing of his memory palace, devoted to Will Graham declaring his love. He assumes the part about emotional idiocy will be selectively edited from the memory.

“You’ve said it in bed. Never out of it. I wasn't entirely sure. That emotional idiocy you mentioned, perhaps.” Hannibal’s gone all stiff and formal, uncertain, self-protective. It would be adorable if it didn’t make Will ache to comfort him.

Will curses himself silently. _I love you_ is not something he naturally voices all that often in his rare relationships and he’d just sort of assumed Hannibal _knew_. That the whole “giving up my life and my identity and flying to Argentina to live with you” thing pretty much covered it. Apparently he’s been wrong. 

Emotional idiocy all around, then. 

He decides the moment calls for a light touch and moves closer, squeezes his fingers more tightly around Hannibal’s, raises an eyebrow. “So you thought you were just _that good_ that you could fuck emotions out of me that I don’t have the rest of the time.”

“You do become rather vocal. And you would not be the first person to profess an emotion in the throes of an oxytocin surge that he wouldn't otherwise--”

“Oh, my god, shut up and stop talking like a doctor, Doctor Lecter.” Will knows exactly what he’s doing, the title something he waves in front of Hannibal only when he’s trying to provoke a particular reaction, and that’s exactly the reaction he gets. Narrowed eyes, a closing of the remaining space between them, and he figures he’s got about twenty more seconds for real conversation. “I love you, you idiot. I loved you before I even knew it. And I will try to remember to tell you that more often when I’m not flat on my back. Which does _not_ mean that I’m going to stay in your line of sight at all times. You can’t be my whole world, Hannibal. Not all the time.”

The gap between them closes to nothing, and Hannibal’s eyes are so dark now Will could fall into them and never find his way out. “And right now?”

“Yes. _Yes._ You can be my whole world right now.” Will lets Hannibal half-guide, half-push him toward the living room, too impatient for the bedroom. 

He’s not sure anything really got solved but he’s also not sure he cares. He lets it go and reaches out and lets Hannibal become his world. As if he weren’t that already.


	4. Chapter 4

_Eight Months, Two Weeks: Rosario_

Since Will knows they didn’t fully resolve their argument, and he knows Hannibal can be utterly manipulative when it serves his ends, he probably shouldn't be surprised. And yet he sucks in a breath and it takes a moment for his mind to catch up with what his eyes are seeing as Hannibal holds his present out to him.

“I thought we couldn’t do this yet. ‘Once we decide whether to stay here indefinitely,’ is what you said, I think.” 

Even as he’s half-scolding Hannibal he’s reaching out for the box and beginning a mental inventory of what they have on hand and what they need to get. It’s been years since he last had puppies

“I changed my mind, since we seem to be fairly settled here.” Hannibal reaches to reclaim the cardboard carrier with the air holes punched in it as he adds, “If you don’t _want_ them, I’m sure I can take them back and someone else will be happy to--” 

He grins smugly as Will clutches the flimsy carrier, which tips and wobbles in his hand. Like hell are they going back. They’re _his_. He can barely see them through the holes in the box but he already knows they belong to him and they’re going to fill an empty place in his life that he hadn’t been allowing himself to think about. Well. His and Hannibal’s. Mostly his.

He drops to the floor and quickly undoes the catch of the carrier the rest of the way to see exactly what Hannibal’s brought him. “How did you even do this? Did you kidnap them? If you did, I’m calling in an anonymous tip to Freddie myself just to see the headlines, you monster.” 

Two of them. Lab mixes, maybe? It’s hard to be sure so young and when they’re trying so frantically to get out of the box, to jump up and sniff at his hands, to explore their new home. A boy and a girl. They’re going to need beds, collars, leashes, chew toys so they don’t destroy Hannibal’s furniture. He’ll have to adjust his regular dog food recipe for growing puppies. There’s so much to do.

“There _are_ shelters in Rosario, Will. I’d intended to suggest we foster, which would have been more practical in our situation, but these two seemed to want to belong to us permanently. They’re going to need quite a bit of care and training but I suspect you won’t mind providing it.”

“Of course not…” A thought strikes Will and he glances up sharply from the girl puppy, currently sniffing and licking at his hand. “Is this about the other day? This is a rather convoluted way of keeping me from straying too far from home. You can’t keep me at home up to my elbows in puppies forever.”

“My gifts often serve multiple purposes,” Hannibal admits readily. “They will keep you close. They’re also an apology. However, my primary motivation was simply to see you happy. Are you happy?”

Will considers being annoyed but a tiny yip comes from the boy puppy as the girl tumbles over him, and he melts. He doesn’t answer the question, but then he doesn’t really need to. He’s smiling so hard his face hurts. “Just remember this was your idea the first time they eat one of your fancy shoes. Did the shelter send you home with any of the stuff we’re going to need?”

Hannibal fetches the basic supplies from the car and they spend the evening making the puppies comfortable in the guest bedroom. They’re never going to have a guest, so it may as well be the puppies’ room. Will sniffs and grumbles about everything - the food, the cheap bed, the flimsy collar - but finally admits it will all do for tonight and they can go shopping in the morning.

They quarrel happily about names. Hannibal names the boy Cavall. Will delights Hannibal by knowing the source of the name, and then he annoys Hannibal just as much by insisting on naming the girl Sophie. Hannibal apparently believes in names with literary or mythological significance, but Will just thinks this little scrap of fur and eyes looks like a Sophie. He refuses to be deterred and rejects any name with greater meaning to it.

Eventually both puppies are fed, content with their exploration of the room where they’ll stay confined for their first night or two, and they collapse into an exhausted, overstimulated heap. Will strokes their small sleeping heads with a single finger and watches them breathe for a long time, their bellies rounded with their dinner. 

Hannibal observes him observing the puppies. They stay that way for a long time, perfectly content in their separate observations. Will wonders idly if Hannibal’s ever drawn a dog before, and just how frustrated he’s going to get when he finds out they do not hold still for portraiture.

Eventually Will unfolds himself from the floor, joints popping, with a quiet groan. He’s been down there long enough for it to hurt to get up again. He holds out a hand and pulls Hannibal up with him, then continues tugging until he’s pulled him into a tight hug. “Thank you. They’re wonderful. Get ready, because we’re going to have a million fights about where they’re allowed and how many of your clothes they’re going to ruin.”

Hannibal scents Will’s hair in that creepy-adorable way he does, and Will wonders if he smells properly like himself again now, with dog fur clinging to him for the first time since he left Maine. But Hannibal just says, “I imagine so. I can’t bring you new puppies every time we have a fight about the existing ones. That would be difficult to sustain. We’ll have to get better at resolving things other ways.”

Will glances up at Hannibal in precisely the way he knows drives the other man crazy, and smiles. “I liked the way we resolved the last one. Although maybe a little less biting, next time. I’ve still got marks.” He thinks maybe, somewhere under the tan, Hannibal might actually be blushing. He’s delighted, but relents for the time being. “For now, though, I’m hungry and we seem to have missed dinner. Could you possibly help me throw together a late-night snack that doesn’t involve multiple courses or unnecessary garnishes?”

Hannibal collects himself, kisses Will, and sighs. “You’re a savage. Even a snack can and should be presented properly. All of the senses need nourishment.”

They head for the kitchen, bickering about the necessity of presentation of snack foods, leaving the snoring puppies behind. Will makes a mental note to check on them later. And to teach Hannibal to make dog food. And to convince him that the dogs, their dogs, will not care if it’s plated nicely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus chapter! This was supposed to be the first half of the next chapter, but the next half is getting awfully long and turning into a chapter all on its own. So rather than try to pad this one out with even more fluff, I'm just going to slip it in here ahead of schedule. Because hey, who couldn't use some puppy-related fluff on a Friday?


	5. Chapter 5

_Eleven Months: Rosario_

He’s not surprised when the search result comes back, not exactly. This was always the plan, it was what needed to happen, and he all but frog-marched Molly into making it happen. He’s been expecting it any time now.

Somehow it still feels like a punch to the gut.

Will gazes unblinking at the laptop screen for a long while, zoned out. He wonders disjointedly how people who deserted their lives used to find out about their divorces or annulments. Rumor mill? Carrier pigeons? It’s so much easier to find out what’s going on in the life you abandoned, these days. It’s the blessing and curse of the internet.

So there it is. Done. There’s some legalese on the web site where such data is apparently posted publicly, but as far as he can tell it boils down to “Given Will Graham’s colossal failure to turn up for his own divorce hearing, considered along with all the other ways he fucked up over the years, this seems like the best thing for all involved. Go forth and find a better life, Molly.” And he hopes she does. He wants that for her.

And yet there’s a stinging behind his eyes and he suddenly needs a drink very, very badly. 

Fortunately their life is not lacking in a well-stocked liquor cabinet. He’s been working on his bartending skills lately, but he’s pretty sure this is a straight-hard-liquor occasion if there ever was one, so it’s straight to the whiskey. He pours a generous slug into a glass, knocks it back, considers a refill, and then mumbles “fuck it” and just takes the bottle with him.

He leaves the laptop open on the desk but doesn’t go back to it; what’s the point? What else is there to know? He drops onto the sofa instead, drawing a brief protest from Cavall, who’s sprawled on one of the cushions.

“Cheers, buddy.” He raises the bottle toward Cavall and takes another long swig. “I’m officially divorced _in absentia_. You can be the first to congratulate me.”

Cavall cocks his head at the sound of his human speaking to him, but drops it to his paws again when he decides no interesting treats or games are forthcoming. 

Will shrugs, decides if he can say _in absentia_ he’s much too sober, and keeps drinking.

The last of the afternoon slips away and he doesn’t pay much attention to it. He lets the whiskey wrap him up in its burn and smoothness until it rubs away the sharp edges of his hurt, leaving a more general ache and sadness. _Molly_. Sweet, tough, funny, whip-smart Molly. If anyone could have rescued Will from himself, it would have been her, and she’d gotten closer to doing so than anyone could have expected. Just her luck that she stray she chose to bring home was the one who, deep down inside, didn’t entirely want to be saved. 

He’d tried to tell her early on what a disaster she was getting into, but she’d thought he meant “disaster” in some ordinary way. A bad family life, a difficult ex, communication issues, work-related PTSD - she’d understood and accepted all that with open arms and he’d never quite figured out how to explain that none of that was really what he’d been trying to warn her away from. How to say _I have a hole in my heart in the shape of someone else, and I can’t seem to fill it up with anything, not work, not drinking, not strays, not running myself exhausted. But you, Molly. Oh, you would be such a good fit for the places I’m broken. Not quite the right shape, but so close we could ignore the gaps. But you’ll feel the wind whistling through the places you don’t fill and even if you don’t know why, you’ll know there are some places in my heart you don’t -- quite -- touch. And we can go on like that for a long time. Maybe forever. It might be enough, because I do love you terribly, with as much of myself as I have to give. But you should know that’s what you’re signing on for. You should know exactly how broken I am and what parts of me aren’t really mine any more to give away_.

He’d tried to say it, he really had. More than once. He’d never found the right time or the right words and it was just so fucking _easy_ to let it go. And it had been good, what they’d built together on the shaky foundation of his brokenness. Better than it had any right to be. And now it’s...nothing. A closed file. A few lines on a county web page.

He doesn’t cry. He should, the burning in his eyes calls for it, but the tears don’t come. He just sits and drinks and remembers and loses track of the time and by the time he hears the front door open he’s pretty well gone. He thinks about getting up or calling out a greeting but he feels slow and heavy, and his body doesn’t entirely want to cooperate with his brain. He’s short-circuited some connection there. He should probably be concerned, given how much it takes to get him drunk at all, given how little is left in the bottle now, but “concern” is another one of the things that isn’t working quite right at the moment.

So he just stays where he is, where Cavall’s now flopped over against his leg even if he can’t quite feel the warmth or pressure of it. He swallows most of what remains in the bottle, and he waits for Hannibal to find him.

Which he does, and he’s all jaunty pleasure to be home for about five steps past the threshold of the room, until he observes and recalibrates. Will can imagine what he’s picking up - the empty bottle, Will’s breath that must smell like a distillery, his eyes glazed and bright with tears that won’t fall. He’s probably a mess. He should probably say something, explain something, do something. All he can manage is a sort of half-wave and Hannibal’s name, and he can hear the slurring as he says it.

Hannibal’s eyes widen ever so slightly and he’s across the room in a flash, plucking the bottle from Will’s hand over his protests. “ _Enough, Will_. Too much, obviously.” He puts the bottle out of reach and checks Will over quickly, touching his forehead, looking into his eyes, gripping his shoulders tightly, and Will can’t figure out in his haze whether Hannibal’s checking him for alcohol poisoning or just trying to make sure he’s still in there, somewhere.

“‘m fine. Don’t get all...all…” Words fail him. “Like you get.”

“How is that, exactly?” Hannibal’s voice is calm but there are undercurrents, something swimming beneath the cool surface. Danger? Worry? Anger? Hard to say. His ability to read Hannibal may be a little short-circuited right now, too. “Tell me how I get. Or tell me what exactly you think you’re doing. Just talk.”

“You get like a doctor.” There. A sentence. He’s doing better. He thinks for a moment, going almost cross-eyed with the effort of it, and pulls himself together for more sentences. “You want me to talk so you can make sure I’m not gonna pass out. I’m not. Just needed…” And there go the words again. Because what did he need, really? What did he think he was going to find at the bottom of a bottle? Oblivion, maybe. Forgiveness. Something. “Congratulate me.” His tongue tangles over “congratulate” but he gets it out. “I’m a divorcé.”

Hannibal stares blankly for a moment and then just says, “I know. I saw that a few days ago.” He seems to be somewhat relieved by Will’s ability to form sentences, though, and sits back a bit.

“You knew. You didn’t tell me?” He’s angry, maybe, somewhere on the other side of the wall the whiskey has helped him build between himself and his feelings. If he is, it’s a vague, distant sort of feeling, more an idea of anger than any real heat. It’s good here, where his sharper feelings are far away. 

“I didn’t realize it mattered.” Hannibal’s voice is clipped and cool. Will’s still not reading Hannibal right, can’t tell what’s going on behind his eyes, but it’s something not good. It’s hurt or anger or confusion, maybe. Something Will put there. Something he’s going to feel sorry about when he sobers up, he’s pretty sure. “You knew that would happen when you came to me. A final formality.”

“Didn’t know it was going to hurt so much.”

Oh, and _there_ , he might as well have slapped Hannibal the way he flinches, the way the hurt flickers over his expression, and Will’s stomach lurches. He’s fucking this up. He fucks everything up. That much he can feel even through the fog in his brain.

Will rubs a hand over his face and tries to pull his booze-soaked mind together. “I didn’t mean… Fuck. I’m sorry.” He’s not one hundred percent sure who he’s apologizing to, or what for, but he knows he’s desperately sorry about something. “I can’t think straight.”

Hannibal is gazing at him almost impassively, but not quite. There’s still that something around the corners of his eyes that Will can’t quite get a grip on. “Clearly.” He closes his eyes for a long moment and then when he opens them again he’s all business. “I’m guessing you didn’t eat lunch?” Will shakes his head mutely. “A shower, then, and some food. If we’re going to have a discussion about your ex-wife,” and Will thinks maybe he detects the tiniest emphasis on the _ex_ , “either you need to be more sober or I need to be drunk. Come on.” 

He has to all but haul Will to the shower, Will’s legs not entirely steady. But he must not be as angry as all that, because when Will pulls at Hannibal’s shirt he sighs, removes his clothing as he’d already removed Will’s, and follows him into the shower. He helps keep Will upright until the stinging-hot water starts to do the job of clearing his head. And when the droplets rolling down his face suddenly somehow remind Will how to cry, and he falls apart right there in the shower spray, sobbing and shaking and naked and either too drunk or not drunk enough, Hannibal holds him through it, holds him like he’s something precious and loved. And Will doesn’t feel any gaps at all between them, no places their hearts don’t touch, nowhere they don’t blur into one.

When he finally emerges from the shower he feels light, raw, hollowed out. He feels like he might float away.

He follows Hannibal obediently to the kitchen, feeling like one of their puppies, and lets Hannibal sit him down with a mug of coffee and a plate of what, for Hannibal, almost qualifies as a light snack. Hannibal can’t help himself - even when he’s not trying to cook, the plate of cheese and fruit and salami he throws together is beautiful. And delicious. Will’s suddenly ravenous.

Hannibal watches him eat, thoughtful and quiet and hurt, before he asks. “Do you regret it?”

Will’s tired. So tired. He owes an answer, though, and he tries to make it a sincere one despite how scraped-raw he feels, all jangling nerve endings. “No. I made this choice more than once. I’d make it again.”

“You could unmake it.”

“I don’t want to. And I couldn’t, even if I did want to. Conjoined, remember? More so, now. I just…” He sighs and tries to focus. “I think I’m starting to forget who I used to be. It’s easier that way but it makes it hurt more when I do remember.”

They sit quietly for a few moments, Will gazing bleary-eyed into his coffee cup as if he might find the right thing to say somewhere in its depths.

Eventually he settles for, “It’ll stop hurting, eventually. Just another scar for my collection.”

Hannibal looks tired now, too. Whatever he had in mind for his evening it probably hadn’t been picking up the pieces of his distraught lover’s grief about his ex-wife. Will can’t even blame Hannibal, isn’t even surprised, to hear him say, “I’d kill her if it would remove her from your memory.”

They’ve had this conversation before, if perhaps not as bluntly. It’s worn ground. So Will just nods. “I know. You know it wouldn’t help.” 

“I know.”

There doesn’t seem to be much else to say. Will’s still feeling wrung-out and he’s grateful when Hannibal takes over again, clearing the table, leading Will to bed even though it’s still early, sliding under the covers with him and holding him wordlessly. 

Will drifts in and out in a haze of exhaustion and sorrow and what’s left of the whiskey in his system. At some point he thinks he hears Hannibal humming something soft and soothing in the darkness. Later on, minutes or hours, he rouses himself enough to say, “I’m sorry.” He means at least a half dozen different things by it, and he’s sure that Hannibal understands every one of them.

“All of you, Will.” The voice comes from behind him, breath warm against his neck and stirring the short hairs there until he shivers. “I want all of you.” Will hears the unspoken rest of that thought. _Even your grief. Even when I don’t understand it. Every part of you belongs to me now. Every part of you is mine_. And he can’t deny it, nor does he want to. 

He drifts, and dozes and wakes again, and eventually slips into a true sleep without dreams.

In the morning he has the worst hangover he can remember having since long before Hannibal Lecter ever came into his life, but he feels light and oddly peaceful.

They step carefully around each other all day, talking of nothing more substantial than the dogs’ latest trick or what to have for dinner. It’s a fragile, gentle, wounded sort of day. After dinner, Hannibal reads on the sofa with Sophie asleep at his feet. Will watches them from the doorway. They look peaceful. They look like he wants to feel.

He finds a place on the sofa next to Hannibal and curls up with his head not quite in Hannibal’s lap, just brushing against his thigh. He lies there and breathes in and out, eyes closed, too spent to do anything else. After a few minutes he feels a warm hand brush through his hair, down the side of his neck, coming to rest on his shoulder with a thumb rubbing idly against his skin. Hannibal goes on reading and Will goes on breathing and they spend the evening that way, waiting for their assorted hurts to scar over and recede into memory.


	6. Chapter 6

_One Year: Rosario_

A few months earlier, they’d had a rousing disagreement about their anniversary. Hannibal persisted in believing their anniversary dates from Francis Dolarhyde’s death. Will had insisted just as vehemently that while there might _technically_ be an argument to be made for that, he would prefer to have an anniversary that did not date from anyone getting shot, stabbed, killed, or half-drowned. Also, he suggested, it might be nice to have an anniversary that did not coincide with a round of “ _Where Are They Now?_ ” headlines on TattleCrime, rounding up purported sightings of Will and Hannibal in the year since their disappearance. 

Will had won the argument - a year of living with Hannibal has been enough to mostly learn when to give in and how to press when he really wants to win - and they had agreed that their anniversary dates from the moment Will arrived in Argentina.

And so, Will finds himself at a fragile juncture - their first anniversary, at a time when the balance between them is still delicate after his disaster of a drunken breakdown two weeks earlier. They’re both still smarting a little, still treading lightly with each other. It might be a good idea to ignore the whole “anniversary” thing at this juncture.

And yet. A year seems worth celebrating. More importantly, Will’s fairly sure that Hannibal hasn’t ever _had_ an anniversary. Hasn’t ever had anyone he could safely keep close enough for long enough to reach one. He hasn’t asked for a roster of Hannibal’s previous relationships - just thinking about them makes jealousy coil hot in his stomach and it’s probably better for all involved if he doesn’t know the details - but he’s sure of that much. 

So, it’s an occasion. Something is in order. Will considers and rejects a variety of gift ideas before deciding to keep it simple. He stops in for a visit with Hannibal’s tailor, and after a fair amount of pointing and pantomime and translation between his schoolboy Spanish and the tailor’s good but heavily accented English, they manage to collude on a new suit. One of the lighter-weight, less gaudy things Hannibal wears these days as protective coloration, but still in a color, fabric, and cut that he’ll love. 

Hannibal’s contribution to the proceedings is apparently to be a grand anniversary feast, and when the day comes he heads into the kitchen early to get to work. Will leaves him to it and vanishes upstairs to shower and shave and dress for the occasion. 

Standing in their bathroom, towel around his hips, steam curling around him, applying aftershave from a tasteful ship-less bottle, his mind drifts back to the first time he’d intentionally dressed up for Hannibal. That first therapy session, after his release from BSHCI. He’d had a different sort of seduction in mind then. Or maybe that’s just what he’d been telling himself at the time. Even looking back with all he knows now, he’s never been able to entirely pinpoint the moment when the rest of this became inevitable. He’s more or less given up trying.

He finishes drying off and attempting to exert some level of control over his hair, heads back into the bedroom, and dresses carefully. His own socks and underwear, and for the rest, Hannibal’s new suit. Hannibal’s new shirt, pants, jacket, tie. They’re all just a little big, ill-fitting on him, but then that’s the idea. He turns back the sleeves enough that they won’t hang down over his wrists and irritate him, and goes to the mirror to make one more attempt with his hair. 

He wonders if Hannibal will have the suit dry-cleaned before he wears it, or if he’ll wear it just like this, enjoying the faint smell of Will on the clothes. Will’s never going to understand Hannibal’s thing for smelling him, but he’s not above taking advantage of it when opportunities present themselves. He checks the mirror one last time. He looks ridiculous. But then, he’s not going to be wearing this for long.

He heads for the kitchen, where he predictably finds Sophie and Cavall dancing attendance on Hannibal, hoping for some scrap to fall to the ground. Hannibal’s chopping away at some herbs and Will’s content to watch him, the flash and gleam and sureness of his knifework, his absorption in the work, his precise and economical motions.

Eventually Hannibal looks up, smiles to see Will, and then frowns as he takes a more careful look. “Did Ruben make that? He’s slipping, that's not right on you at all. Come over here.” He sets the knife down and reaches for a towel to dry off his hands, motioning Will toward him.

“No, you come here.” Will doesn’t want to risk getting any kitchen mess on Hannibal’s new suit. And he has a game in mind. And, to be perfectly honest, there’s always the thrill of Hannibal coming at his call, bending to what Will asks of him. It must be something like having a tiger eat from your hand. His pulse speeds slightly just for this much, Hannibal crossing the room to him, even with the frown, even with the hurt that’s still rippling between them.

He waits until Hannibal’s close and reaching out to touch the fabric before saying, “Happy anniversary. It’s for you. Should fit you much better than it does me. Ruben’s still sharp as a tack.”

Hannibal’s frown melts away then, replaced by a tiny quirk of a smile. “That’s a relief. I’d hate to have to find a new tailor. But why, pray tell, are you wearing _my_ suit, then? I believe you have a very nice wardrobe of your own, most of which you hardly wear.”

“I thought you might like to unwrap your present yourself.” He steps back, just once, just for the pleasure of watching Hannibal chase him, mirroring him. “To make sure you like it.”

Hannibal tugs at one of the lapels, breathes Will in, checks a seam, licks his lips - he can’t help himself, he’s torn between examining the suit properly and examining Will underneath it. So very predictable, Will can’t help but laugh. He doesn’t realize until the sound ripples from him that it might be the first time he’s laughed in days. It feels good. It feels like a tension easing. He takes another step back, watches Hannibal follow, and wonders if he even knows he’s doing it.

Hannibal glances back at the cutting board on the counter and protests unconvincingly, “I’m in the middle of dinner.”

“So come back to it later. Is there anything that’s going to burn or go bad if it sits out for half an hour?”

That draws Hannibal’s attention back to him, a smile and a questioning, “Half an hour?”

“Or ten minutes. Or an hour. It’s your present, you get to decide how fast or slow to unwrap it.” He watches Hannibal break, and laughs again, victorious. It feels even better to laugh the second time.

Everything on the counter gets shoved back out of reach of any questing dogs, the pot of water boiling on the stove gets turned off and the kitchen is abandoned in favor of the bedroom. Whatever else may still be mending between them, this always works, this hunger for touch.

In the end, Hannibal opts for slow. He undresses Will painstakingly, fingers brushing over his skin lightly, only as much as needed to take off his clothes, as if Will himself is an afterthought. He stops to examine each piece of clothing and comment on the workmanship, the stitches, the fabric, the color. Over Will’s protests, Hannibal explains calmly (or almost calmly, there’s a rough edge to his voice that gives him away) that it’s only proper to take the time to admire and appreciate a gift. He sets the clothing aside carefully. He undresses himself with plenty of help from Will’s roaming and eager hands, and then he thanks Will for the gift with a light brush of a kiss and turns away as if to go try on his new suit.

Will’s the one to break, this time, with a gruff “don’t you _dare_ ,” and a sharp tug that brings Hannibal tumbling down on top of him. He sinks back and pulls Hannibal with him and loses himself entirely in skin and mouths and sighs and no _more damn fabric, shut up about the fucking suit, Hannibal, I swear to god I will give you the tackiest souvenir t-shirt I can find next year if you don’t come here right now_ , and by the time they’re done they’re far too sweaty and messy to even think about having Hannibal try on the suit. 

It’s only then, when breath and calm return, that Hannibal lifts his head from its resting place over Will’s heart to ask, “Next year?” Will hears the question underneath that one and nods, opting to address it obliquely, idly trailing his fingers over Hannibal’s back. Reassuring him, rebuilding the damaged bridge between them. 

“The tackiest t-shirt I can find you. You’re going to hate it. The year after that, maybe a tiki mug? It’s going to get worse every year. I hope you like the suit, because this is the best it gets. Just wait and see what I get you for our tenth anniversary. You’ll hate it.” 

He feels the last bit of tension go out of Hannibal’s shoulders beneath his hands at that response, and knows he heard the promise wrapped inside the threat of terrible gift-giving. They rest together for a while longer, words neither necessary nor wanted. Finally Hannibal kisses him once more, sweet and slow and sated, before he goes to clean himself up and return to their abandoned dinner. Will stays lazy and contented in their bed for a while longer before he follows suit.

Dinner is late, but delicious. It’s far too much food for the two of them, even with Hannibal slipping bites off his plate to Sophie beneath the table. Will pretends not to notice; he’s too entertained by how hard Hannibal has fallen for Sophie and how willingly he breaks all of his own rules to pamper her. After dinner he’ll provide some choice tidbits to Cavall, to make up for Hannibal’s favoritism.

Later on, with the dishes washed and the night getting late, Will sprawls on the sofa with a glass of wine, leaning up against Hannibal, who’s attempting to read. He’s not actually getting very far in his book, between Will draped against his shoulder and Cavall and Sophie wrestling on the floor nearby, all gangly puppy legs and boundless energy. But he’s making a valiant effort.

Will drifts for a while, full and content and surrounded by everything he needs, until eventually he tugs on Hannibal’s sleeve to get his attention. Once he has it he asks: “Happy?”

Hannibal considers the question and his present situation for a moment before responding only, “Unbearably.” He turns back to his book and Will considers interrupting him again, for the sheer pleasure of Hannibal’s regard, but he decides there’s no hurry. They have time. He can ask again tomorrow, and the day after. Every day for another year, if he wants and if their luck holds out.


	7. Chapter 7

_One Year, Six Months: Rosario_

Hannibal’s been fidgety for a solid two weeks. Not that anyone else would notice. “Fidgety” on Hannibal consists of a tap of the fingers here, a clearing of the throat there, the slightest distance in his expression. But Will notices. He notices it and he doesn’t like it. 

These past few months have been calm, happy, no ripples disturbing the waves of their runaway life. Will likes it this way; maybe he’ll get tired of the peace in another, oh, fifteen or twenty years, but no time soon. 

Whatever’s stirring now, he doesn’t think it’s anything good. If it were something concrete he’d snap and snarl at it like one of his dogs.

He tries to give it time, time for Hannibal to either snap out of it on his own or tell Will what’s occupying him. But when nothing changes after two weeks, Will eventually gets impatient. He’d intended to have a nice calm conversation about it in a well-chosen moment, but being Will and not particularly gifted in the social niceties, he ends up blurting it out in the car when Hannibal nearly misses a turn one too many times: “What is going _on_ with you?”

Hannibal cuts a glance over to him quickly, then back to the road, and lets out a small huff of a sigh. “I sometimes long for the days when you were not quite so adept at reading my intentions.”

“Too late for that. Something’s been weird with you for weeks. You’re driving me crazy.”

“I’ve been weighing asking you for your thoughts about something. I don’t know how you’ll feel about it.”

Will feels an urge to shrink down in his seat, become invisible, not hear whatever it is Hannibal wants to ask. He can imagine all sorts of things he wouldn’t much like to hear. But he asked. _If you play, you pay_. “Only one way to find out. Go on.”

Hannibal hesitates, perhaps trying to decide if their drive home from running errands is really the right time for this, and then seems to decide to go where the conversation is taking them now that it’s underway. “Perhaps you are aware I keep track of some people from our past. I believe you do the same.”

“Once in a while. Not much lately.” Will stopped paying much attention after the divorce had gone through. He trusts Hannibal to keep tabs on what they need to know to stay safe, and for the rest, Will is happier in the present if he doesn’t hold on too tightly to the past. So he doesn’t know where this is going, or what news he may have missed. 

“It’s come to my attention that an acquaintance of ours will be travelling outside of the United States soon. Dr. DuMaurier.”

“ _Bedelia_.” Will doesn’t like the twist of bitterness that he can hear in his voice. He imagines it must be visible on his face, and he’s glad Hannibal’s looking at the road ahead and not at him. They don’t talk about Bedelia much, or about her time with Hannibal. Will prefers not to think about it. He doesn’t like to admit how jealous he still is, even now. The forgiveness he’s managed to extend to Hannibal for leaving him in a pool of his own blood doesn’t extend to the woman he ran away with. It’s unfair, but true nonetheless. Bluebeard’s wives don’t coexist well. “I haven’t been keeping tabs on her. I don’t think she’d want to hear from me.” 

“Nor from me.” Hannibal still sounds wary, but perhaps slightly amused as well. Will suspects Hannibal scents his jealousy and is irritatingly pleased by it. “But I do owe her a visit. There are unkept promises. It hasn’t been at the front of my mind. I would not risk our life here by returning to Jack’s hunting grounds. But if she’s going to step outside them, certain possibilities open up.” He pauses and seems to wait for a response. When he doesn’t get one, he follows up: “If I’ve been distracted, it’s because I have been wondering what you might think about those possibilities.”

Will stays quiet for several minutes, watching scenery slide by, fingers clenched tightly He listens to the sleeping monster within him as it stirs restlessly but doesn’t -- quite -- wake. His jealousy apparently doesn’t extend to having a thirst for this. Or at least, if there’s a thirst there, it’s one weak enough to be controlled. Eventually he asks, “If I say no?”

“Then that will be the end of it. Our circumstances changed. I made new promises that outweigh the old.”

“Is that difficult for you?” Will’s still staring out the window, hard. This is something they don’t really discuss, something that was easier when they were just voices on a phone line. When it was abstract.

“It’s not as easy as I could wish. I miss my old hobbies, if that’s what you’re asking.” He sounds so _calm_ , and Will can’t understand how. “But I don’t intend to do anything about that if you still prefer me not to. You’re avoiding the question.”

“I’m not avoiding. I’m considering.” He is, he realizes. His instinctive answer isn’t _leave Bedelia alone, let the sleeping dog lie, stay out of danger, stay with me_. It should be, but it’s not. There’s a part of him whose answer is _I want you to have what you want_ , and another part asking _why did Bedelia, of all of us, walk away unscarred?_

He doesn’t have to look at Hannibal to hear the tiny smile in his voice. “That’s promising. Consider, then. It won’t be for two more weeks. There’s time to consider and time to plan.”

They drive the rest of the way home silently. They don’t discuss it again until late the next day, Hannibal already in bed when Will comes in from settling the dogs in their room. He closes the door carefully behind him. One of the few rules Hannibal won’t bend even for Sophie is no dogs in the master bedroom. 

He leans back against the door and considers Hannibal in the lamplight, in their bed. In their home. _His_. He would give Hannibal almost anything. He can give him this, maybe. To an extent. As much as he can live with. 

He tells himself that what he’s considering is a mercy and not an extraordinary cruelty, and he almost believes it.

He undresses slowly and deliberately, giving himself time for reconsideration. He doesn’t look up to see if Hannibal is watching. And then he slides under the covers, across the expanse of their bed, and insinuates himself under Hannibal’s arm, against his heart.

He holds there for a long moment, relaxing into the press of skin against skin and the steady metronome of Hannibal’s heart. Finally he says, “I don’t want you to kill her.” Hannibal quirks an eyebrow down at him but doesn’t respond. He seems to sense that’s not the end of what Will has to say. Will takes a breath and continues before he can change his mind. “If you need some sort of reckoning, I won’t stand in your way. But no killing. She lives. Marked, if you must, but she lives. And I don’t want any details.”

Hannibal sighs and his arm tightens around Will as he considers the offer before responding. “If that’s what you wish, she lives. But your way is not any kinder than mine would be. She’ll wonder forever when I’m coming back to finish it.” His voice drops a little lower, a little husky, as he adds, “Cruel boy.”

“Yes.” Will doesn’t elaborate, but he thinks _she knew what she was getting into when she left with you. At least my way she lives_. He wonders if people will say that about him one day. He supposes they’ve already done so, and it doesn’t bother him as much as perhaps it should. Perhaps he is a cruel thing at that, although he could do without being a ‘boy’ at his age. If he is cruel, it’s what Hannibal made of him or found buried at his core and brought to the surface, and he’s done fighting it. 

He shrugs off the accusation, knowing it was more of a endearment than anything. “You will do what you need to do and you will get out, quickly. If you can’t do it safely, you won’t do it at all. You’ll be careful. You’ll come home to me.”

“Always.” 

He feels the need to say it again, to impress on Hannibal how important it is. “You’ll come _home_ , Hannibal.”

“I promise. I’ll come home. You’ll barely have time to miss me.”

Will ducks his head again to press his ear against Hannibal’s heart and he can hear it beating perfectly steady, not the slightest blip or speeding up as they discuss Bedelia DuMaurier’s life or death as if they’re planning tomorrow’s dinner or flipping a coin. He wonders what his own heart sounds like. He wonders if Hannibal and Bedelia discussed him this calmly, while he was lying in his hospital bed out of his mind with pain and loss and they were doing whatever it is they were doing in Florence.

“It’s over, after this, with Bedelia. You won’t go back again, so get whatever closure you need now. And if you get caught, I’m going to come for you. I’m going to break you out of wherever you are. And then I’m going to strangle you personally, with my bare hands. This is a stupid risk and you know it.”

Hannibal pulls away from Will enough to look him in the eyes. “But you’re not going to stop me?”

Will shakes his head, a little horrified at himself, and avoids the eye contact, something he hasn’t needed to do in a long time. “Apparently not. When will you go?”

“Two weeks. I won’t be gone long. A few days. You could come. I’d like it if you came with me.”

“ _No_.” He bites the word out, maybe a bit too harshly. He doesn’t want any part of Hannibal and Bedelia. “I’ll be here.”

Hannibal rubs a small, soothing circle against Will’s shoulder with his fingertips and looks at Will like he’s seeing something unfathomably rare and precious. But he only says, “I’d like to call you, if I may. While I’m away. It would be a pleasure to hear your voice in my ear again, if we’re to be apart.”

Will nods mutely, and burrows closer against Hannibal. Negotiations done, they sit quietly for a time together, breathing as one, moving only in small gentle motions of hands and breath.

Later, as they’re falling asleep, Hannibal curls even tighter around Will than usual. He promises him the moon and the stars and the earth and everything in between. Whispers love and gratitude in every language Will knows and some that he doesn’t.

Will listens, soaking it up in silence, wondering if Hannibal can really keep a rein on this, and if Will actually wants him to. He thinks about Hannibal bloody in the moonlight, his jungle grace and savagery. He lies in the dark and he aches, body and soul, and when he finally slips into dreams, it’s the Dragon he meets there. 

When he wakes in the middle of the night, it takes him a moment to realize the blood in his mouth is his own and not Dolarhyde’s. He reaches for Hannibal, and any protest the man might have even considered giving about being woken so abruptly dies when he tastes the copper on Will’s bitten lips. They’re half awake, there are few words, and Will comes so hard in Hannibal’s unforgiving grip that he forgets his name, forgets Hannibal’s name, certainly forgets the Dragon and Bedelia. He falls asleep again almost immediately and the rest of his sleep is untroubled.


	8. Chapter 8

_One Year, Seven Months: Rosario_

Hannibal leaves in the afternoon on a Friday with two suitcases in the trunk. It’s a lot for a short trip, and Will carefully doesn’t ask what exactly Hannibal has packed for this occasion. Or precisely where it is that Hannibal’s going. He doesn’t want to know, until the moment the car passes from view, and then he stands there with the taste of Hannibal’s lips already fading and wants to run after the car and beg. He’s not sure what he would beg for - for Hannibal to stay, or take him along.

Since he doesn’t know what it is that he would do if Hannibal did stop for him, and it’s too late anyway, he just calls Sophie and Cavall inside with him and sets about occupying his time.

For the remainder of that first day he keeps busy. There are small things to fix around the house, music to listen to loudly with no worries about disturbing Hannibal’s work, the dogs to exercise, dinner to prepare. He’d managed, just barely, to talk Hannibal down from leaving him prepared meals, with the assurance that he really had managed to feed himself for many years and could do so for a few days without lapsing into scurvy and malnutrition.

He’s doing fine, right up until midnight finds him wide awake, alone in the big empty bed and unable to fall asleep. He tosses and turns for a while and then moves to the guest bedroom where he can stretch out in the guest bed with Sophie and Cavall pressed against him. If he doesn’t sleep, he’s at least surrounded by warm and undemanding love and the soft wheezy sleeping-dog breaths that remind him of nights in Wolf Trap. He dozes fitfully until dawn, provoking little protests from his bed companions every time he wakes and reaches unthinkingly for someone who’s not there.

On the next day he takes their little boat out and spends most of the day on the water. He fishes a little but mostly he sails, and drifts, and does his very best to turn off the thinking part of his brain. He tries and somewhat succeeds in losing himself in wind and water and sun. 

Sometimes before he catches himself, his mind drifts to Hannibal and Bedelia. He’s seen all the pictures that the journalists dug up once Hannibal was in custody, of them together in Florence. The parties and the lectures and the apparently highly glamorous life they were living as Dr. and Mrs. Fell. It was a far cry from the quiet, solitary life Will and Hannibal now live, rarely bothering with social events, their home spacious and comfortable but by no means the elaborate artwork of a living space that Hannibal and Bedelia had shared. 

If he let himself, Will would wonder whether Hannibal ever misses any of it. He would let himself wonder how long Hannibal’s been tracking Bedelia and precisely why. He would let himself fall into a self-pity self-loathing spiral the likes of which he hasn’t seen since before Molly. It would be very, very easy to do and Hannibal would come home and find him a disaster, and he doesn’t want that. So when the river is no longer distracting enough, he heads for shore and home.

He doesn’t call Hannibal; he doesn’t know what Hannibal is doing and won’t risk endangering him with a call at the wrong moment. But he answers the phone on the first ring when Hannibal calls and something tight in his chest unfurls when he hears Hannibal’s voice. It’s like being back in Maine all over again, those first few days home after the hospital, those first tentative phone conversations.

“Hey. Tell me this isn’t your one call from prison, please.”

Hannibal’s laugh is warm and Will relaxes a bit further. “Don’t be such a pessimist, Will. I’m quite good at this, you know.”

“You’re out of practice, and you were never as good as you thought you were. You did get caught.”

“Turned myself in, darling. It’s not the same thing at all.” Hannibal’s voice is lilting, delighted, and he doesn’t usually call Will pet names. (Doesn’t need to, when he radiates adoration any time Will looks at him. It’s a little ridiculous, really.) He’s practically giddy, for Hannibal. Will knows without asking that the trip is going well, and that he doesn’t want to know precisely what “well” means in this context.

He leans back and stares up at the ceiling for a moment before organizing a response. “Sophie misses you. She’s been complaining all day.”

“Give her my love and tell her I’m hoping to be home tomorrow night, or Monday at the latest.”

“I’ll do that. Cavall and I don’t miss you at all, just for the record. But it is nice to hear your voice this way again. Feels like old times.” Will thinks maybe he can hear water running and glasses clinking, like Hannibal is washing dishes. He really, really doesn’t want to know.

“It does. This is better, though. I like knowing that you’re in our home, waiting for me.” Hannibal’s voice goes soft just there, and Will feels it in his bones.

“If you’re lucky. You should probably hurry back before I get restless and wander off. I could get into all sorts of trouble with no one here to keep an eye on me.”

“Hmm.” It’s a vague little noise - Hannibal’s distracted by something. Or someone. Will thinks he hears a thump in the background. “I will do my very best. I’m going to have to get off the phone in a minute, I’m afraid. I’ll call you in the morning and let you know when I expect to be home, all right?”

“I suppose. Be careful. Come home safe.” He doesn’t intend to add anything else, but he’s nearly certain now that wherever Hannibal is, Bedelia is _right there_ and he can’t quite help himself. “Tell me you love me.”

That gets him a chuckle and a small disapproving clicking noise, as if Hannibal knows exactly what motivated it. Knows that he wants Bedelia to hear the words. But he gives Will what he wants, like he always does. He responds a little too loudly, “I adore you beyond all reason. I miss you terribly. And if you wish, I can stay on the line a few moments longer and tell you exactly how I intend to prove my devotion when I return home.”

Will flushes and rolls his eyes even though Hannibal’s not there to see it. “No need to go overboard.” Not that he doesn’t want to hear exactly that, but there’s only so far he’s willing to go to make a point to Bedelia. “Come home tomorrow and tell me in person. I love you. Goodnight.”

He spends another night in the guest bed under a blanket of dogs but he sleeps a little better. He doesn’t wake until Hannibal calls him again mid-morning. It’s a brief call, but Hannibal still sounds cheerful and relaxed, and lets him know he’ll be home that night barring unexpected complications. Will dozes a little more and then wiggles out from under Cavall’s outflung limbs to start his day.

The day drags by but he does his best to make it move along until midway through the evening when Sophie and Cavall start in on their “we hear our human’s car” dance and he has to hush their barking. 

Hannibal comes home to them not much different than he left, with little outward sign of where he's been or what he’s been doing. Will thinks maybe he can detect a certain extremely subtle relaxation in his movements. Something Will hadn’t even quite realized was tense, now uncoiled. A hunger sated and sent back to sleep. Something in his stomach clenches at the knowledge that he was not the cause of that satiation. He chokes that feeling off and kisses Hannibal welcome, lets himself be held tight, lets himself have the slight indignity of clinging back a little too hard.

Hannibal heads for the shower almost immediately and Will follows him without asking permission, stripping down impatiently and leaving his clothes scattered on the floor. He checks Hannibal over carefully as the water pours down on both of them, looking for something - he’s not sure what. A sign that nothing’s changed, or that everything’s changed.

All he can find is a puncture wound on one arm. Two small points, like a vampire bat attack. Hannibal shrugs and tells him, “An oyster fork. Nothing to worry about.” 

Will stares at the wound and responds, “Shut up. I don’t want to know.” He drags his tongue over it once, questing for any lingering taste of blood, smirking at the faint hiss his pressing on the wound provokes, before he kisses Hannibal hard enough to make sure he can’t provide any more details. 

He lathers and rinses Hannibal’s hair slowly, cleans him off, and makes sure he’s otherwise uninjured. And then he pins him to the tile wall and doesn’t let him go until they run out of hot water, until Hannibal begs for the bed before his legs give out entirely, until Will can forget where his lover’s been and what he’s been doing. 

Later, back in his own bed with Hannibal, he sleeps easily and deeply. He dreams of falling endlessly toward a sea that recedes just as fast beneath him as he can fall toward it. He falls and he falls, with wind rushing through his ears forever, and Hannibal is not with him. He’s unbearably alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting schedule's gonna be a little funky this week because of holiday stuff, my darlings, but you'll still get two chapters, just maybe not on quite the usual days.
> 
> I would also like to note that this chapter makes me sad that this is a Will-POV fic because this would have been more fun to write from Hannibal's POV. I'm considering writing it up that way as a 'deleted scene' of sorts, at some point, mostly for my own amusement.


	9. Chapter 9

_ One year, Nine Months (Rosario) _

Serious conversations are hard to time.  First thing in the morning and they’re too sleepy-lazy-cuddly for anything weighty.  After dinner, and Will’s too full and tipsy, or too busy trying to seduce Hannibal, or both.  Afternoon seems right but either Hannibal’s out with his clients, or Will’s busy trying to figure out how to start a conversation in and around the rest of their day. Interrupt Hannibal’s reading?  Chat over lunch? Try to discuss something difficult on a walk with the dogs, serious inquiries interrupted by the need to throw sticks endlessly?

There’s probably a really good way to do it, if Will can just figure it out.

Instead, he overthinks it until it comes out in a rush, on a warm night on the balcony with after-dinner drinks. Hannibal looks out at the view and saying something about how much he loves his life here with Will, and Will blurting out awkwardly, “I love it here too I think we should leave.”  Just like that, one smushed-together thought without a break, and then he puts his drink down, lowers his head into his hands, and sighs. “That was just about the worst possible way I could have said that, wasn’t it?”

He dares a glance over to Hannibal and finds him looking impassive but sounding his usual self, delighted with basically anything Will might say, as he responds. “You probably could have managed something worse with a little effort.  How long have you been holding on to that?”

“A while.”   _ Since Bedelia. Since I can’t stop thinking about what I sent you off to do and what memories it stirred up. Since I’m worried you let something slip and she's going to send Jack after you, back here somehow. _ He doesn’t say any of that. He suspects Hannibal already knows some of it, from how poorly Will’s been sleeping, how he’s started obsessively searching online again for any hints that the search for them might be ramping back up from its current semi-cold-case state. “We don’t have to. I know it would be a pain.  Your work and the dogs and finding a new place to live.”

“But you want to go somewhere else.”

“Not tomorrow, or anything. But yes. Can we?”

“Are you getting bored here?”

Will reaches for his glass again and takes another swig before meeting Hannibal’s eyes.  “A question for a question. I feel like we’re back in therapy.”

Hannibal just waits.  Will’s evasion, also, is reminiscent of being back in therapy and they both know Hannibal can out-wait Will four times out of five.  Eventually Will cracks, as they both knew he would.

“Not bored. Restless. If that distinction makes any sense at all. Worried that this can’t last.”  He mutters the last part low and quiet and half-hopes Hannibal won’t even hear it.

Of course he hears, damn his unnervingly fine-tuned senses.  “So you want to outrun your worry.  Force change before it can catch up with you on its own.”

Will glares and knows he’s glaring and isn’t sorry.  Sometimes he thinks of all the ridiculous and unexpected twists his life has stumbled through, the worst one, above and beyond the betrayals or the killings or the imprisonment, is the simple fact of him falling entirely and irrevocably in love with a psychiatrist. “I swear to fucking Christ, Hannibal, if you psychoanalyze me right now you’re sleeping on the sofa tonight. Can we forget I ever said anything?  It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

Hannibal just fucking  _ glows _ at him, the way he’s always done, the way he’s doing even more ever since Will let him go to settle his debts with Bedelia, and he reaches over and settles a warm hand on Will’s arm before answering. “I was unclear.  Of course we can move.  I always told you we could move anytime you wanted to. In any regard it would be prudent for us to change scenery occasionally. I’ll run away with you any time you ask but I would like to know what we’re running away from.”

A  _ psychiatrist. _ He couldn’t have fallen in love with a nice murderous pet shop owner instead?  Will takes a deep breath and tries to steady himself. It’s a fair question Hannibal’s asking and it deserves an answer even if he is acting like a psychiatrist.

“Myself, I suppose. Jack. Delaying the inevitable moment when you get bored with me.”  He tries to make it sound like a joke.  It doesn’t sound like a joke.

There’s a long unbearable pause, and then Hannibal says: “Three years.”  That doesn’t sound like a joke either.  Will waits, twisted in knots.  “Every day almost identical, routines broken up only by indignities or lawyers or the occasional visit from the likes of Frederick Chilton.  I spent most of them in my memories.  I have a great many memories of a great many places and people. Artworks in museums and those I created from blood and bone.  Do you really think that’s where I spent my time?”

Will fights the urge to curl in on himself and shakes his head, but can’t look up. “I don’t know. Some of it. You had a lot of time to fill.”  

“I did. A thousand nights with only myself to play Scheherazade.  I did spend some of them with my favorite sculptures, and in the sunnier parts of my childhood.  I spent more of them with you.”

He’s tempted to ask which memories, but he thinks if he knew he might actually crumble and die from the enormity of having left Hannibal there for so long.  He just stares harder into his glass like it might get him out of this conversation he really didn’t mean to have tonight. “I tried not to spend much time in my memories of you. Thought it probably wasn’t the healthiest thing to do.  You kept showing up anyway, though.”

“Of course I did.”  Hannibal doesn’t even sound smug, just like he’s stating a fact.  Which he is.  They’re conjoined in their memories as they are everywhere else they touch.  “The point is that I was never bored with my memories of you.  And I’m considerably more entranced by the real thing. You are many things, but you couldn’t be boring if you tried.”  He pauses and then goes on in a lighter tone, perhaps sensing Will’s overwhelmed inability to cope with this particular conversation. “But I can happily be entranced by you anywhere you wish to go.  If you don’t already have a destination in mind, may I suggest we put an ocean between ourselves and here?”

An ocean sounds like a good idea, and Will grasps at the gift of a change in topic. “That could work. What did you have in mind?”

“I thought France might be a good place to settle. I’d like to show you Paris first, if you’ll indulge me. And then perhaps somewhere a little more secluded.”

Will considers that.  His French used to be fairly fluent; it’s rusty and more Cajun than not, but it will come back with practice.  He’ll be more independent there.  Hannibal will be delighted to be near Paris again.  They’ll have proper seasons, and Sophie and Cavall can play in the snow.  He likes the sound of seclusion. Any temptation to look backward may fade, with so much distance between them and who they used to be.

He doesn’t have to think about it for long.  “That sounds perfect. When can we go?”

“My previous travel arrangements haven’t involved dogs; we’ll have to figure out the best way to travel with them.  And new identities, if we’re trying not to leave a trace for Jack to follow. A month or two, perhaps, to do it right. Can you wait that long, or are you so eager to leave our home?”

Will shakes his head, mute for a moment.  He’s loved their life, their home. He came so far to find it. Eventually he finds a voice again. “No. I’m this close to suggesting we buy it so we can come back someday. But I suppose that’s unwise. Leaves too much of a trail.”

Hannibal nods an equally reluctant agreement. “It would be unwise.  But you do seem to have a tendency to make me unwise.”

It’s tempting. But Will shakes his head more decisively this time. “It’s not worth the risk. Maybe you could make me a drawing, though? Before we leave.  We’ll hang it in the new place.”

Hannibal sounds delighted with the request when he answers, “I thought I was the sentimental one.”

Will thinks he might be blushing. It’s ridiculous that he can still be made to blush. At his age. After this many years. By Hannibal Lecter. At least the evening darkness hides it.  He tries to sound gruff and mostly fails when he says, “You’ve been a bad influence on me.”

“If I’ve helped you feel able to ask for things you want, I’m entirely pleased with my influence. And with you, Will.”

A little shiver down his spine, still, when Hannibal is entirely pleased with him.  That, too, seems ridiculous at this point. And yet. 

He watches wordlessly as Hannibal stands and gathers their now-empty glasses, leaning over to place a gentle promise of a kiss on his lips.  “I’m going to finish cleaning up and get the dogs settled for the night. Stay out as long as you want.  We’ll start planning tomorrow.”

Hannibal leaves the sliding door open and Will listens to the faint sounds from inside - music, dishes, jingling as the dogs dance around Hannibal in the kitchen.  Home. He’ll have those sounds wherever they end up, and so wherever it is, will also be home.

He stays outside for a long time, watching the stars, warm with love and gratitude. For the willingness to move. For the dogs. For all of it.  He tells himself he’ll leave the sense of unease behind and take only this with him when they go.


	10. Chapter 10

_ Two Years, One Month (Paris) _

Will holds up the poetry book when Hannibal walks into the room, and Hannibal at least has the grace to look mildly ashamed of himself.  _ Very _ mildly.  He holds out a hand in protest, palm facing Will, before Will can speak.  “In my defense, if anyone gets far enough into our lives to find that, our cover is already thoroughly compromised.”

Will tries and doesn’t quite succeed in suppressing a smile. This is going on the ever-expanding list of “things that really shouldn’t be funny, but somehow sort of are, because his life is not like other people’s lives anymore.”  “Okay, but  _ autographed _ ? To Dr. Fell?”

“It was entirely his idea. He came for dinner.  I believe it was his notion of a gift for his host.” 

Hannibal crosses the room and sits down, wine glass in his hand.  Because of course, their temporary apartment in Paris comes with a lavish set of every conceivable type of wine glass. The heat barely works but they will never want for the right stemware. No wonder Hannibal likes this city.  

Will likes it, too; he feels freer here, further out from under the shadow his worry about Bedelia had cast into their lives, farther away from anyone who might be hunting them.  He had fallen into Hannibal’s life in Argentina; here they’re building a new life together from scratch, and he hadn’t realized how badly he needed that until it happened.

Will glances down at the book in his hand with a skeptical expression. “He must have thought highly of his own talents.  Are the poems any good?”

“They’re not terrible, nor remarkable. I believe sales increased dramatically after his death.”

“Untimely and dramatic ends tend to do that.”  Will traces a finger lightly over the raised lettering on the cover:  _ Songs of the World. Anthony Dimmond. _ He remembers the name from the police files. He remembers the glossy pictures of Dimmond’s torn, raw flesh, obscenely and beautifully exposed. “So he brought you a gift and you killed him.”

“Not that night. And not because of the poems."

There’s a pause. A chance for Will to decide he doesn’t want to know.

He wants to know.  

He doesn’t feel a danger in this, like he did with Bedelia.  Anthony Dimmond is over, there’s nothing there to linger and cause new trouble.  And after all, Dimmond is one of the things that brought them back together. Dimmond, and the message that Hannibal made of him.

It does occur to him that the very lack of danger he feels in this conversation could, in itself, be a danger.  He tries to remember if he would have asked for this story two years ago, when he had first come to Hannibal, or if he would have preferred to forget Hannibal’s past.  He thinks maybe there was a time when he would not have wanted to know more.

Will rises to his feet from beside the half-unpacked box of books, giving up the original search he’d been on for one of his own books.  He joins Hannibal, fitting himself snugly under the other man’s arm, forcing him to shift his wineglass to the other hand. “You had him to dinner more than once, then.”

“Twice. The first time was a sort of test.”

“Was it a success?”

“Not precisely.”

Will breathes out a sigh and leans closer.  “Tell me.”

Hannibal lets a single puff of laughter loose against Will’s hair and then obliges. “We met by chance at a party.  I was there looking for someone else entirely, for reasons which I will leave to your remarkable imagination.  We spoke only briefly. When we met again by chance some weeks later, I was using a different alias.”

“Awkward, I imagine.”

“Indeed.  But to be perfectly truthful, he would have come to an untimely end even without that issue, if our paths kept crossing.  He reminded me just enough of you, and not enough of you.  It was intolerable.”

Will determinedly does  _ not _ think about the fact that he was probably still in a hospital bed while all this was going on, biting back agonized sounds every time movement pulled at the wound in his stomach.  He does  _ not _ wonder whether he was hating Hannibal or loving him, on that particular day.  Probably it was both.  Most days it had been both, for a while. 

Instead he twists up for a kiss, slow and sweet as molasses, and admonishes Hannibal gently.  “If you went around killing every foul-mouthed cranky man you met at parties, love, it's a miracle you weren't caught sooner.”

“He had a lovely mouth.  As do you.  But it wasn’t that.  The coloring, perhaps.  Or a certain willingness to state in no uncertain terms his disdain for the people around him.  Almost everyone there was a bore but most of them didn’t know it.  It was that kind of party.”

He says that last sentence with a certain emphasis and a smile that makes Will nearly sure it’s a joke he doesn’t quite understand, but he opts not to pursue it.  “I’m just saying. ‘He looks like you’ is a terrible reason for killing people.”

“It’s possible I was making impetuous choices at the time.”  The wineglass goes to rest on the table, and Hannibal half-pulls Will into his lap, straddling his legs.  It doesn’t take much pulling; Will was just about ready to head in that direction anyway.

He allows a few more kisses, a gentle but promising press of bodies, and then he pulls back despite protests and shakes his head.  “You were telling me a story.  Finish the story.”

Hannibal glares at him through mussed hair in his eyes and mutters, “You are terrible.”  But he goes on.  “I believe I was about to say that I invited him to dinner.  He brought that poetry volume you found. Circumstances conspired to let him leave whole and sound, and  with an invitation to a lecture I was giving a few days later.  I don’t believe he paid much attention to the lecture itself.  Afterwards, he both supported my false identity, and made it very clear that he knew it  _ was _ false.  It didn’t go so far as blackmail but I imagine it would have gone in that direction eventually.  He wanted me bent and twisted to his particular purposes.”

Will closes his eyes and lets his imagination loose and can almost see the moment Hannibal would have decided to turn Dimmond’s words back on him, to contort the man himself for Hannibal’s own purposes. To call to Will.  It sends electricity down his spine and he’s suddenly less interested in the rest of the story.  

He twists just slightly himself, a press of his thighs against Hannibal’s in case the other man has forgotten their relative positions.  Although evidence suggests he hasn’t.  Will considers pointing out that Hannibal bends and twists for him, and only for him, but he knows he doesn’t need to.  He knows Hannibal’s already thinking just that.  So he says only, “So that’s where you got the idea.”

“Inspiration arrives in unexpected ways.”  Hannibal’s tone is mild but the tightening of his hand on Will’s hips isn’t.  “The lecture hall was far too public to resolve the issue, so I brought him back for dinner.  He ended up not making it so far as the first course.”

Will casts back in his memory for exactly how Dimmond had died and finds he can’t recall.  It had been difficult to tell right away with the extent of the mutilations, and then he’d been plunged into the nightmare of Mason Verger.  While he’s sure he could find the gory details in one of Chilton’s books, he’s opted not to read them.  “How?”

“Blunt force trauma.  Inelegant but effective, and sometimes one must improvise.  I didn’t need his head for my display.”

“Your  _ message. _  You were writing to me.”

“You are terrible and  _ narcissistic." _ Hannibal’s voice is rough and fond all at once, and Will still isn’t sure how he does that. “Yes, I was writing to you. And you came.”

Will’s memory isn’t precisely like Hannibal’s, he can’t always call up every single visual detail of what he’s seen on command. But his memory for emotions is strong and he can remember so clearly reaching out for Dimmond’s broken body, Hannibal’s raw heart, the sheen of it imagined in the chapel light as real as anything that his eyes had actually seen in the crime scene photographs. 

He wonders if it would have comforted Dimmond to know that his ending had also been poetry, even if that poem had only been written for and visible to an audience of one man and the dead girl in his head.  Probably not.

“It was beautiful, Hannibal. Of course I came to you. How could I have resisted it?”

Neither of them mention that he’d come armed with a razor-edged forgiveness. It’s past. Left behind in the sea like so many other sharp things between them.

He lets Hannibal catch his mouth then, and gives the man his breath and his sounds and his forgiveness too, even though it’s no longer needed after all this time.  He’s still seeing Dimmond’s red and broken body in the darkness behind his eyes and it ought to be at odds with the sensations of his body but it’s not.  

It all works together.  It’s all beautiful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All hail to the marvelous [KareliaSweet](http://archiveofourown.org/users/KareliaSweet/pseuds/KareliaSweet) for helping to name poor Thirsty Scarf Dad's first poetry collection.


	11. Chapter 11

_ Two Years, Three Months: Paris  _

One month in Paris stretches into two and threatens to become three. Hannibal’s insisted on making this a proper honeymoon. Will scoffs and points out that their new identities as Tomas and Nathan Drake were created out of thin air already married and it’s not as if there was an actual wedding that requires celebration, but there’s no heat behind the argument. He not-so-secretly delights in noticing how often Hannibal finds gratuitous reasons to refer to him as “my husband” to waiters, shop clerks, or anyone else who will hold still long enough for Hannibal to find an excuse. 

Will knows what married feels like and he feels married again, even if there’s nothing legal underlying it. Legalities have never been important to Hannibal beyond knowing how to evade them, and for his part, Will’s forced to admit that by the time you find yourself on your second fake identity, it might be time to admit you’re not that attached to the law anymore.

So they linger in Paris, walking for hours with Sophie and Cavall through a city that turns out to love dogs, much to Will’s delight. Hannibal shows Will the places he loves, and together they find new parts of the city to make their own. They spend hours talking over the home they will choose together somewhere outside but near the city, when they can finally tear themselves away from Paris. What the shapes of their new lives might look like - Hannibal thinking about moving his business from antiques to books, Will wondering whether he may find teaching or tutoring work in a country where he speaks the language better than he did in Argentina. 

They draw up imaginary floor plans for houses that seem to end up 50% kitchen and 50% doghouse, debate whether it’s even possible to get an adult dog to accept an alias, and review their made-up backstories until they can tell them in perfect harmony.

Together, they create a design for their new life.

Will finds that in these conversations there is one thing they don’t talk about that his mind keeps returning to, worrying at like a loose tooth or a new bruise. He keeps thinking back to the specific sated happiness that Hannibal had when he came back from Bedelia. He thinks about how much farther away they are now from anyone looking for them, how even Freddie’s constant stream of Murder Husbands coverage is starting to die down. The new freedoms that might be provided by less scrutiny. He tries to remember if he ever actually asked Hannibal to stop killing altogether, or if Hannibal offered it unasked, and finds he’s no longer sure. He remembers Hannibal with him on the clifftop: the moonlight, the blood, the charged moment before the fall. But it’s a dangerous topic and he doesn’t want to broach it until he knows exactly what he wants to say, so for now he holds this one thing close to his chest.

He lets Hannibal go a little overboard buying them both a  new wardrobe for their new climate, putting his foot down only when Hannibal tries to persuade Will into particularly gaudy colors. For his part, Hannibal doesn’t voice any complaints when Will takes over large swathes of their small apartment with various messy tinkering projects. They’re getting better at the whole “compromise” thing.

Certain rules are still firmly in place, though, so when Hannibal invades the kitchen one afternoon while Will is still working on a batch of dog food, Will waves a spatula at him menacingly. “No hovering. I’ll clean up your precious kitchen when I’m good and ready.”  

Hannibal is a meticulous cook, efficient, cleaning as he goes and using only what he needs for the job. Will tends to use every bowl and knife within reach, and to leave a giant mess to be cleaned up at the end. Will can sometimes see Hannibal visibly tense with the effort it takes not to swoop in and start moving things around while Will is still in the middle of cooking. He figures it’s only fair, given the effort he regularly expends in not subtly rearranging Hannibal’s  _ mise-en-place  _ just to mess with him.

Hannibal stops at a safe distance from the threatening spatula to show his good intentions, and averts his eyes from the disaster Will is making of their tiny rented kitchen, which was never really intended for preparing large batches of dog food. 

“I didn’t come to hover. I just wanted to let you know that I ran into Madame Duval and she asked if we’d be staying on past the end of the month. We’ll need to let her know in the next week or so.”

Will feels his shoulders tense. This is probably the time for that conversation. He forces himself to relax and nod. “Okay. Let me finish up in here and clean everything to your exacting standards, and then we can plan. Twenty minutes, okay?”

“Agreed. May I come say hello if I promise to keep my hands off the dirty dishes?”

“Deal.”  Will gives the contents of his cooking pot a quick stir and lets Hannibal kiss him hello, then shoos him out of the room. He stirs the dog food again and then starts running some water for the dishes, frowning slightly as he arranges his thoughts for a conversation that’s likely to get more complicated than Hannibal is imagining.

He finishes up in the kitchen and restores it from his chaos to Hannibal’s order, then joins Hannibal in the sitting room, picking his way around the prone and snoring forms of the dogs to take a chair. He announces, “The kitchen is now safe for your obsessive need for order.”

Hannibal looks up from the tablet he’s reading with a half-smile. “I suppose if I tried to explain the value of knowing where things are when preparing recipes that require precise timing, we’d just end up in the same discussion we’ve had about this a dozen times before.”

“I suppose. Let’s just assume we’ve had the argument and I’ve let you win, because I had other topics I wanted to get to.”

“I accept the victory. What’s on your mind?”

Will fidgets with a button on his sleeve and dives in. “I’ve been thinking about something, and it might affect whether we move or not. So I thought I ought to lay it out even though it’s pretty half-baked right now.”

Hannibal tilts his head, interested, waiting.

Will wishes, not for the first time, that there were self-help books out there for How To Be In Love With A Serial Killer. He’s never actually read a self-help book but he’s pretty sure they don’t cover the kinds of things he finds himself needing to know these days. In lieu of a guidebook, he fidgets again and dives in. “We have this fresh start, and it seems like a good time to think about our...ground rules, I guess. So I’ve been doing that. And mostly I’ve been thinking about how you were when you came back from your trip. From Bedelia.”  He mostly manages not to make a face, at least. He’s never going to like thinking about her, but Hannibal’s shown no inclination to go back and he’s trying to let it go. “You were happy. And I thought for a while it was about her, but now I think it was about you getting to hunt for her. I think you miss it.”

Hannibal’s gaze is intent and serious, the tablet set aside. He thinks for a moment before responding, “I do. But our life has other compensations that more than make up for it. I don’t miss anything enough to risk your safety by resuming my activities.”

Will traces the carpet pattern with his eyes to have something to do that’s not eye contact. “See, that’s the thing. Risk. That’s what I worry about too, when I think about this. Which is...I’m pretty sure I should be more worried about the whole ‘people dying’ thing. And I am. I mean, I’m never going to be okay with you running around taking out anyone who cuts you off at the light or splashes mud on your pants.”

“They were very expensive pants.”  

Will tries to cast a glare over at Hannibal for the interruption but can’t help a smile. He’d just been taking a wild guess at the sort of infraction that might have earned a place in Hannibal’s freezer in his previous life, but apparently he’d guessed right. Or Hannibal’s joking. It’s not always easy to tell, even now. Except for the puns; those are hard to miss.

“I’m just saying… there  _ are  _ people whose disappearance would be a net gain to the world. And I love you and don’t want to keep you from things that make you happy. And the longer we spend together, the more I care about that, and the less I care about anything else. But I also don’t want you doing anything that would get you caught. And I don’t know how to reconcile all those things. But I’m thinking about them.”

“You are the most extraordinary thing. And perpetually surprising to me.”  Hannibal’s tone of voice is a caress and Will could just sink into it and never come out again.

“If I weren’t surprising, I’d have ended up the main course at one of your dinner parties years ago.”

“You were never in any real danger of being served to anyone else. I’d have kept you too jealously for myself.”

“Comforting, Hannibal.”  The banter’s relaxed Will a little -- which is weird, he knows that, it’s fucking weird, but it’s also just how their life goes now and it turns out that all he ever wanted in life was an all-day-every-day screwball-comedy routine about cannibalism, and he’s surprisingly okay with that. “Seriously, though. I’m not saying we should change anything. It’s just, we were going to move outside the city. But if you were going to hunt again, eventually, you’d need a city. For choice and for camouflage. To be safer.”

“ _ If _ I were going to hunt, I would travel to do it. I wouldn’t risk a trail leading to our home. I’d have to change my methods; less display, less often, further afield. I wouldn’t need to live in Paris proper, if you’d still prefer to live a bit further from civilization.”

"Not that you’ve been thinking about it, or anything.”  

Will can tell from the way Hannibal’s leaned forward in his chair, a sudden vibrating energy through him, that he’s thought about it and is delighted to be thinking about it now. Talking about it with Will.

“I am what I am, Will.”  It’s not an apology, just an observation that Hannibal provides with a graceful shrug. “I refrain from actions, not necessarily from thoughts. Let’s both go on thinking. Meanwhile, I propose we stay on one more month to give ourselves time to go looking for our new home. We’ll find the right place to live and we’ll settle in and then we’ll figure out whether we need to change any ground rules. is that all right?”

Will couldn’t help smiling back even if he wanted to. He’s a sucker for the words  _ our new home _ . “I concur with the plan. It’d be nice to have real space to stretch out in again. And a proper kitchen to mess up.”

Hannibal stands and heads toward the door to the kitchen, but pauses by Will’s chair first, to pull him to his feet and to cradle Will’s face between his hands. He looks altogether too smug as he asks, “One more question, though. This new train of thought of yours. Is it really as entirely selfless as you make it sound?”

Will could lie his way out of this one. He chooses not to; he holds the eye contact. “Not entirely. I still think about that night. Dolarhyde. That we could share that again. I’m not saying I would. I don’t think I would. Just…”

“You’re thinking.”  Will nods, out of words. Hannibal’s hands on him tighten, not hurting, just pressure, and he watches Hannibal’s expression change from smugness to something altogether more vulnerable. “You overwhelm me. At times I suspect I drowned that night, and all of this is the last whimsy my brain is concocting to distract itself as it runs out of air.”

Will understands the sentiment. He’s had that thought himself. But he tells Hannibal, “Your dying wish would never involve this much dog hair.”

“Perhaps not. I think our wishes are beginning to blur, though. Don’t you?”

“I suppose they are.”

Probably that ought to bother Will. It doesn’t. Together they set the topic aside for now, to be revisited another day, and go to tell the landlord they’ll stay one more month. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to be a bit off-posting-schedule, between the holidays and some sort of horrible death-plague-virus I'm all discombobulated. Hoping to be back on a Wednesday/Saturday posting schedule now but things may continue to be a bit wonky until such time as I can do things like breathe and sleep again. You know, the little things. Nothing important.


	12. Chapter 12

_ Two Years, Six Months: Rouen  _

Finding the house was easy enough once they settled on the right general area:  Between Rouen and Paris, secluded but not entirely isolated, near enough for culture and dining, far enough for privacy. A place to dock a small boat for Will, a yard for the dogs, a kitchen even Hannibal agrees can be made to serve with a few alterations.  “A few” turns out to mean something rather different to Hannibal than it does to Will, but Will quickly decides to stay the hell out of the kitchen alterations in the interests of domestic peace.  

_ Moving into  _ the house turns out to be significantly more difficult. 

In Argentina, the rental house had been partly pre-furnished and partly decorated by Hannibal before Will’s arrival, and he’d never done much to change any of it except to bring in beds for the dogs and to rearrange the furniture a bit. He’d willingly disappeared into Hannibal’s life and all of its trappings, and it hadn’t bothered him how little of it was his own.

Faced with a new and empty home to fill and furnish from the ground up, though, things get trickier. Some compromises are easy enough to make. Will’s learned some appreciation for the sensory pleasures of Hannibal’s lush fabrics and textures, and Hannibal’s made peace with the dogs enough to have conceded that one cannot live with two young labs and still expect to have a house full of fussy breakable  _ objets d’art _ . 

Will’s perfectly happy to let Hannibal decorate the walls with the pretentious paintings of his choice to make up for the lack of breakable statuary, as well as giving up all say in the kitchen. Hannibal, somewhat reluctantly, lets Will talk him out of the bedroom furniture he’d prefer, all dark and twisted wood, and into something a little less likely to induce nightmares. 

Will takes over one of the spare bedrooms and turns it into a study of his own in which Hannibal is not allowed to pick out a single thing, leaving it a brightly lit, messy, comfortable space for sprawling on the floor working on projects or wrestling with dogs. Hannibal shudders delicately every time he looks into that room, but holds up his end of the deal and doesn’t comment.  Much. 

Mostly, they work it out. But sometimes they don’t. 

The living room curtains turn into a near-fight in the store, voices hushed and tense.  Will refuses to set his eyes every day on the horrifying pattern that Hannibal has his heart set on, Hannibal’s frustrated that the dogs limit his choice of fabrics, and Will nearly has to bite his own tongue in half to keep from suggesting that maybe Hannibal should go back to Bedelia and set up a pretentious little dog-free Italian villa with  _ her. _  He knows better, really, but his tendency to defensiveness still tries to get him in trouble on occasion. They never quite do resolve that disagreement, and the living room goes curtain-less for the time being. 

They figure out the sofa, eventually. Hannibal gives in to Will’s choice when he is reminded that something sturdier than it is pretty would have other uses besides simply holding up under Sophie and Caval’s exertions. Hannibal’s response to that carefully-oblique suggestion is so casually filthy that Will can only desperately hope the salesclerk doesn’t speak English. He rather suspects, from the way she suddenly stops meeting either of their eyes, that she speaks at least enough English.  Will slinks away and becomes determinedly engrossed in looking at end tables they don’t need until Hannibal finishes the transaction and he can drag him out of the store.

Will lets Hannibal pick out their cars, with the caveat that they have to be able to transport the dogs, and lives with his discomfort at the man’s penchant for the sleek and flashy.  The dogs prefer Hannibal’s convertible, but make themselves at home promptly in both vehicles.

Will keeps busy between all of this, retraining the dogs out of bad habits they picked up in Paris, and searching his memory to revive the French he learned young and hasn’t had much occasion to speak in years.  He dives into newspapers for practice and makes Hannibal speak French with him for part of most days, which doesn’t take a great deal of wheedling. Hannibal apparently has a  _ thing _ for Will speaking half-assed French.

Eventually, as things settle down, Will takes up tutoring. He teaches English, at first in exchange for help brushing up on his French, and eventually for pay. They don’t need the money but it makes him feel less like a kept housepet, and it’s good to be teaching again, even if these lessons are a bit more prosaic than some of the lectures he would have given in his old life.  They’re also less likely to follow him home and give him nightmares, and it seems like a fair trade.

He’s friendly and polite with his students but doesn’t invite them any further into his life. One or two of them invite him and his wife to dinner; he corrects them to “husband”, secretly savoring the taste of the word in his mouth, but he never accepts the invitations. They do dine with Hannibal’s antique-store clients once in a while but Will prefers to keep the compartments of his own life strictly separated.  They bleed into each other too easily if he gives any leeway at all for them to do so.

Slowly, Will and Hannibal settle in. Their new house becomes home, their new lives expand to fill their days.

An ocean away from their shared and separate pasts, Will finds his mind closer to peace than it’s been in quite some time.  And when his thoughts do start to buzz, there is always Hannibal to ground and settle and love him, gentle or hard, to provide whichever he needs on that particular day to turn off the white noise in his head.  It’s good, this new life, even better than the last one was.  

It might be better still if they weren’t still keeping their monsters asleep.  It might be everything he could ever dream of in his most secret, unspeakable dreams.  He considers this, and for now, does nothing about it.  There’s time, and there are other things to be done.  
Eventually, he gives in and buys Hannibal the awful curtains for his birthday. He just makes a mental note to never look at that side of the living room again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still sick, so you get literal curtain fic. Fluff makes me feel better. Have some fluff.


	13. Chapter 13

_ Two Years, Eleven Months: Rouen _

“Quintarelli.”

“Almost. Quintarelli.”

“That’s what I  _ said." _

“There’s more emphasis on the l’s. Linger on them a bit. Quintarelli.” 

Will rolls his eyes and knocks back the rest of his glass of wine, heedless of how expensive it was. “Close enough. Next time you can teach me to pronounce the wine  _ before _ you get me drunk on it. Or just get a damn French wine. Who orders Italian wine in France anyway?”  

Hannibal sips at his own glass slowly in contemplation, a silent rebuke, but at the same time he’s smiling fondly at Will. “You’re not that drunk. I’ve seen you worse several times.”

Will grins across the table, in a good mood after a run of good days at home, at his tutoring, comfortable in his skin this evening. He’s not really  _ that  _ drunk, no, but he’s happy and warm and just hazy enough. “Wouldn’t take much more to get me that way.”

“It’s tempting, but we’ve a long walk home and I’d rather not have to carry you.”

Will could point out that Hannibal’s done it before, but it’s not an entirely happy memory, and he doesn’t want to ruin their lovely evening, so he acquiesces. “Coffee, then. To get me home. And cognac when we get there.” While Hannibal orders, Will pours the last of the wine into his own glass and savors it.  They linger over the coffee, chatting about nothing in particular, until the proprietor gets impatient about closing and shoos them out into the cold, clear night.  

They pay and leave and begin the long, late walk home. Will’s maybe properly drunk now that the last of the wine’s caught up with him, a little reckless, a little less concerned with appearances than usual. He takes Hannibal’s hand and leans in closer than he usually would, hums to a song they overhear as they pass by an open window, and after a few blocks he pauses under a streetlight and tugs at the collar of Hannibal’s jacket and drags him in for a serious kiss, heated and fierce, more than he would usually dare in public when he tries to be so careful not to draw attention. At the moment he doesn’t care about the attention.

They press against each other for a long minute, chasing the remnants of wine and coffee on each other’s lips, kisses familiar and needy all at once. Hannibal’s the one who pulls back, eventually with a husky murmur of “When we get back home, Will. Behave yourself.”

Will grins up at him. “Let’s get home, then.”  He leans in for one more kiss, a brief one this time before they get moving again, and it’s only as they break apart that he hears a phrase hurled in their direction in a snarl of a voice.  He doesn’t catch the words but he knows the tone of voice. He knows the sudden set of Hannibal’s shoulders and the angry gleam in his eye and he knows well enough what was said about him. About them. About men kissing in the street. 

His heart pounds as he’s struck with a sudden fierce desire to start a fight.  It’s not as if Will particularly gives a damn what anyone says about him - he’s been ignoring jabs of one kind or another most of his life, albeit usually subtler ones - but he cares when it’s about the two of them, together.  His hand curls into a fist on its own, so tight he’ll have fingernail marks in his palms in the morning.

He sways slightly, feeling how he’s not quite in control of himself, and swallows the impulse down, and tugs at Hannibal. “Come on. Let’s go.”  They move down the sidewalk swiftly, not speaking or making eye contact, but Hannibal’s hand reaches out for Will’s and Will lets him take it.

It takes several blocks for his heart rate to go down, once he’s sure they weren’t followed.  He forces his breathing to slow and steady as well, but he’s still thrumming with adrenaline that has nowhere to go. He realizes he’s gripping Hannibal’s fingers hard, tight enough that it must hurt.

He still wants a fight.

It might be the wine that makes him stop in his tracks, makes him pull Hannibal close again, makes him say, “We could go back.”  But he’s pretty sure it’s not that.  It’s the adrenaline, the anger, the surprise, the fact that he’s part of a _we_ being insulted this time instead of just an _I_ \- a perfect storm of factors that stir the part of him that longs to do something violent and messy and to do it with Hannibal by his side. “We could follow them home.”  He doesn’t have to say more than that; the implication is clear enough. _We could cut their rude tongues out_ _of their heads_.

Hannibal presses his forehead against Will’s and closing his eyes. “Don’t ask me to. If you ask me I may not be able to say no.”

“Why would you want to?  I thought it was everything you wanted.”  What is he even  _ saying _ ? It’s like someone else is moving Will’s lips for him while a horrified part of him looks on. But the hammering of his heart tells him it’s all him, somewhere inside. All the same part of him that wants another Dolarhyde, but can’t bring himself to go hunting for it. He needs it to take him unexpected like this before he can give in. Tonight it’s caught him off-balance, his walls down, and he wants to give in. “You and me. There’s nothing to link us to them. We could.”

But Hannibal, Hannibal who promises him everything, gives him everything, would turn the world upside down for him, apparently won’t do this.  Although at least he has the decency to look like it’s killing him to say no.

“You’re drunk and angry. We don’t know where they live or what we’d be walking into. It’s too risky.”

Will doesn’t know what to do with this, with Hannibal saying  _ no _ to the thing Will’s resisted all this time. Embarrassment joins his other list of unwieldy emotions and he pulls away. “You’d do it if I weren’t here. You’ve done it for less and with less preparation. And since when is my informed consent your big concern?”

He sees that blow land, hard. He’ll be sorry later, but he’s not sorry yet.

“Since I am trying not to repeat my mistakes with you. I can take risks with myself that I can’t take with you.”

“Because I’m what, a  _ liability _ ?”

“Because you’re too precious to me to risk you on some drunk idiots on a streetcorner. Don’t ask me to.”

Will all but shoves Hannibal away from him and keeps ahead of him all the way home, as the anger wanes and the adrenaline and fresh air start to clear his head.  By the time they get home, most of what’s left is embarrassment. Embarrassment and the knowledge that Hannibal is right, that it would have been a terrible idea, and that it doesn’t stop him from  _ wanting _ to go back and find those drunk idiots and to do something risky and ill-advised to them. He’s not sure what part bothers him more.

When they return home he heads straight for the bathroom, where he takes the longest, coldest shower he can withstand until his blood stops boiling. He waits for the chilly water to clear the rest of the fog from his head before he steps out and wraps a towel around his waist.

He crawls damp and naked and shivering under the covers and curls tight with his back to Hannibal, who’s already there in his pajamas, reading. Or pretending to read - Will would bet that Hannibal hasn’t turned a page of that book in several minutes.

Hannibal waits a few minutes and then reaches out one hand to stroke Will’s exposed shoulder lightly. Will doesn’t lean into the touch but he doesn’t flinch or pull away, either, and that seems to be enough. Sometimes they communicate best like this, with silent touch in lieu of the words they’re both too good at using as weapons.

Hannibal sets the book aside, turns out his lamp, and stretches out behind Will, warm and familiar and comforting. He continues to touch Will’s shoulder, then gradually to extend the light touch to Will’s back and arm and eventually he moves in close to comb through Will’s damp hair with his fingers.

Will gradually relaxes back into the warmth of Hannibal’s body, which was probably the intent all along, and begins to drift to sleep.

Before he quite drops off, Hannibal leans over him and tells him low and sweet and sincere, “I appreciate and adore your protective impulses.  But we’ll do it right when we do it, Will. We’ll pick someone worthy of you and we’ll be prepared. Ask me again when the right chance comes and I won’t say no.”

Will shudders once, and he’s suddenly as heated all through as he was cold a few minutes earlier. The words follow him down into dreams bloodier than any he’s dreamed in months.  He sleeps through them just fine; they’re not nightmares at all.

He wakes up painfully early with the sunlight barely beginning to filter through the curtains. Hannibal’s still dead to the world, limbs loose and expression unguarded, and Will feels a fierce surge of tenderness.  Tenderness like love; tenderness like pressing on a bruise.  It  _ hurts, _ sometimes, still, to be allowed to see this.  It feels like something he hasn’t earned even though he knows he has, a dozen times over.  

_ Ache _ really is the only word for it.

He aches in a variety of ways, wants a variety of things.  There’s only one it feels safe to do anything about right now, but he doesn’t want to disturb Hannibal’s sleep.  He rolls over gently to put them face to face, nestles down into the warmth of the blankets, and waits for Hannibal to wake up.  Once he does, Will intends to keep him in bed and occupy him for quite some time, until all the other things Will wants get blanked out of his mind altogether, until he can be nothing but sensation and nowhere but in the present moment.  But he can wait.  

He matches the rhythm of his breath with Hannibal’s, in and out, breath for breath, and he waits patiently for morning to arrive.


	14. Chapter 14

_ Two Years, Eleven Months: Rouen _

Will’s gotten so used to being Nathan Drake, filling in Nathan’s name and false birthdate whenever situations require it, that he lets his own real birthday creep up on him unnoticed. 

So it takes him a moment to register when Hannibal slides arms around him from behind as Will’s hanging up his jacket, breathes him in deeply, and then wishes him a happy birthday. He has to stop and think about the date, and then he laughs and leans back into the embrace. 

“I’d forgotten. Puts a damper on the birthday partying when you can’t admit it to anyone.”

“I suspect you were not the most ardent fan of birthday celebrations even before we met.”

Will has only a few memories to flash through his mind; awkward childhood birthday dinners with his father and no friends to invite, a disastrous 21st-birthday attempt to get drunk in a seedy bar, the fuss Molly had made over the few birthdays he’d had with her. She’d liked birthdays. 

He shakes his head and cuts off that train of thought. “No. Remind me to tell you about the year I turned 21 sometime, though. I think you’ll like that story. It features me being a complete idiot and striking out badly with a series of women who were smart enough to run for the hills the second I came near them.”

“Foolish. Very foolish. I’d have done terrible things to you if I’d known you then.”

“You do terrible things to me now.”  Will twists in Hannibal’s arms enough to kiss him a promise of more later, and then pulls away. “What smells amazing?”

“Your birthday dinner. Which I need to get back to before it burns. Fifteen minutes.”

He disappears back into the kitchen and Will spends a few minutes playing with Sophie and Cavall before washing up and attending his birthday dinner.

It turns out that Hannibal’s been fairly restrained, for him - no fancy centerpieces, no dishes that Will can’t actually pronounce.   There’s duck with some sort of pomegranate sauce that he briefly considers licking from the plate and/or drinking by the spoonful, a wild rice pilaf, roasted vegetables, and enough wine for a small army.  It seems entirely possible that Hannibal has intentions of getting Will drunk.  He doesn’t complain.

His dessert, some sort of pastry-and-berries concoction that looks too pretty to actually cut into,  is delivered with a candle in it and an envelope alongside it. He considers the flickering flame for a moment before blowing it out and watching the thin stream of smoke curl. Hannibal meets his eyes on the other side of the extinguished flame and Will can read the question that Hannibal is too polite to ask. He considers tormenting him - suggesting he’s wished for another puppy, or his old aftershave back. But he’s feeling warm and satisfied from his dinner, and in the end he decides on the truth, touching the back of Hannibal’s hand lightly as it rests on the table: “What else could I wish for?”

“You have me already. It’s a waste of a wish.”  But despite the words Will can tell Hannibal’s happy with that answer, his eyes sliding half-shut in pleasure.

“Even so. I don’t take it for granted. Another year of this. I’ll wish for the same next year if you’ll cook for me again.”

Hannibal nudges the envelope toward him. “If that’s all you want I can take this back, but take a look first and let me know if you’d prefer to keep it.”

It turns out to be plane tickets to Naples for the following month. Will taps them thoughtfully against the tabletop. “Is that safe yet? Italy?”

“We’ll stay far away from Florence, but the south of Italy should be far enough. Naples has its own pleasures that I would enjoy showing you. If you’ll keep the tickets. If you really don’t want a birthday gift other than me, though…”

Will’s trusted Hannibal’s instincts and experience so far to determine what’s safe, he can't see a reason to stop now. “I’ll keep them  _ and _ you.”

“Greedy.”

Will slides the tickets back into the envelope and cocks an eyebrow at Hannibal. “ _ I’m _ the greedy one? Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. You just want to ravish me in as many countries as possible. I bet you’re keeping a list.”

Something both heated and calculating lights up behind Hannibal’s eyes. “I wasn’t, but it’s an inspired idea. I may start one. Prague next, maybe?”

Will suspects he should have kept his mouth shut about that particular thought, but doesn’t quite manage to repress his answering smile. “I’ll consider it. Thank you for my present, Hannibal. Really. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll let my students know about my time off. How long will we be gone?”

“I planned on two weeks. I would gladly change the reservations for longer but I assume you won’t allow it.”

“I hate to board them any longer.”

Hannibal lets loose a grumbling sound but is clearly half-joking, already resigned. “One of these days I’ll just take you away for months and we’ll take those creatures  with us, if it’s the only way to get you to take a proper vacation.”

“Two weeks in Italy is a ‘proper vacation’ by any reasonable standards.  I could make a pretty good argument that our entire life is a proper vacation by any reasonable standards.”

Hannibal appears entirely unmoved. “I never promised you reasonable standards, Will.” 

Will finishes his dessert and pushes his plate away and his chair from the table, standing up and beginning to gather dishes. “I suppose you didn’t. We can negotiate our next vacation. For this one you’ll have to suffer through only having two weeks in Italy.”

“We’ll make them count.” Hannibal’s voice has gone low and growly and Will feels a shiver down his spine but doesn’t give Hannibal the satisfaction of seeing it. Not yet. He scoops up the last of the plates and heads for the kitchen to deposit them in the sink, leaving Hannibal to follow.

He hoists himself up to sit on the edge of the counter, a small rudeness that he knows annoys Hannibal, but he’s banking on being able to get away with a little extra bad behavior on his birthday. When Hannibal enters the kitchen, Will waves him toward the sink. “You’re not going to make me do the dishes on my  _ birthday, _ are you?”

Hannibal sighs and rolls up his sleeves and gets to work, loading many things into the dishwasher and then starting to work on the items that need hand washing. Will lets him get a good start on that, sleeves rolled up, hands soapy, before he hops down from the counter and sidles up behind Hannibal, pressing close and feeling his husband’s entire body still.

“Keep going. You have a job to do. You can touch me when it’s done properly.” Will murmurs this into Hannibal’s ear and then bites his earlobe very gently, gentler than Hannibal likes it, more of a preview than anything. “Try not to break anything, please. I like these dishes.”

A single tremor runs through Hannibal and then he nods, wordlessly acquiescing to the terms of Will’s game as he usually does. He returns to his work, scrubbing at a bit of something cooked onto the bottom of a pan, but perhaps a bit faster and more careless than before, cleaning up the kitchen suddenly a task to be rushed through. He works at his assigned task without any voiced complaint but his concentration appears to be slipping as Will moves his mouth to Hannibal’s jaw, slides his hands under clothing, caressing and distracting and playing.

In the end Hannibal only breaks one bowl.  The doomed piece of china falls to the floor where it’s shattered and forgotten as Hannibal grips the edge of the sink, caged in Will’s arms, and breathes  _ please. _ Will relents then, before they can lose any more of their place settings, and lets Hannibal turn to meet him.

They close the kitchen door on the mess, the dirty dishes and the shards, to be dealt with later, and retire to the bedroom.

Sophie scratches woefully at the closed kitchen door for a while, expecting her usual post-dinner treat from Hannibal, but eventually she gives up and goes to nap with Cavall. Hannibal and Will don’t make it into the kitchen again until the morning but they give the dogs extra treats then, as an apology. 

Will cleans up the broken bowl while Hannibal sets about making breakfast. It’s not his birthday anymore, and anyway, it was mostly his fault.  


	15. Chapter 15

_ Three Years: Naples _

A few days into their visit to Italy, they drive out of the city, to Lago d’Averno.  Hannibal wants to sketch the ruins of Apollo’s temple, and Will follows the walking trail for a time, wishing for Cavall to trot jingling at his heels. 

Instead, he hears the phantom crunching of footsteps next to him, before he actually sees her.  But a moment later there’s Abigail, scarf wrapped around her throat despite the warm weather, matching his pace with long strides and greeting him with a chipper-sounding, “Hey.”

“Hey.” He lets the greeting slip out before he thinks about it, and then quickly scans around to see if anyone overheard him talking to what they would perceive as no one.  It seems to be safe enough.  There are a few other people at the lake, a handful of people arrived before them and one car that had pulled up just after them, but it’s fairly unpopulated this morning.  He’s well out of earshot.

Abigail grins at him, hair blowing in the breeze that’s just started to stir.  “Come on, I hardly ever get you in trouble that way.  You’re not that kind of crazy.”

Will’s pretty comfortable with the kind of crazy he is these days and he just smiles back.  “I was thinking about you.  It’s not quite a river, but even so.”

Abigail  flashes a sideways glance at him from beneath raised eyebrows.  “Sure that’s the only reason?  No other reason you were looking for someone to talk to?”

He scans his thoughts and can’t come up with anything else.  “Nope. I was just looking for someone to take a walk with.  Hannibal’s off being...well.  Hannibal.  I think his need to draw every crumbled ancient building in a hundred-mile radius might actually be a compulsion. He probably needs therapy.”

She laughs at that and kicks at a pebble in her path as they pass by. They continue on down the trail, chatting about nothing in particular when it’s safe to do so, quiet when there’s someone else within earshot.  When the sun is high and warm in the sky they turn around and makes their way back to the temple and to Hannibal.  Just before they get there, before Abigail disappears, she reaches out and touches his shoulder, a ghost-touch he can’t actually feel.  Her face grows serious for a moment as she says, “You never call me up without a reason anymore, Will.  Pay better attention.”  

And then she’s gone, and Will has no idea what that was all about.  His subconscious is good at noticing things, but less good at actually telling him what those things are.  He shrugs it off and assumes it’ll come to him in time if he doesn’t force it.  

He returns to Hannibal, still working away, squinting a bit in the noon sunlight.  He sits quietly nearby and watches the wind create and smooth ripples on the lake’s surface until Hannibal sets the sketch pad aside, and then he comes to look at the sketch. It’s perfect, of course.

They packed a lunch and Will sets about unpacking it, a fancier picnic spread than he’d ever have brought for himself, while Hannibal goes on about the mythology of the place. “It was considered to be the mouth of the underworld. The lord of the dead’s foyer.”

Will casts an eye around the natural beauty of the place, the lake and the sky and the mountains, and allows himself the gentlest of teasing. “A bit pretentious to have a volcanic crater as your front door, don’t you think? Or maybe just your speed.”

Hannibal doesn’t take the bait, he just bites and savors a piece of cheese before continuing. “Perhaps more yours. I can only imagine how delirious with joy you would be to have a three headed dog.”

“I never got the sense Hades particularly liked the dog. Just that he was useful for guarding. Did I miss the myth where Hades takes Cerberus out for walks and teaches him tricks?”

“You’re a savage and I don’t know how you ever made it into the Academy.”

“In-depth knowledge of Greek mythology isn’t typically a prerequisite for a teaching post, Hannibal. And it doesn’t come up in the field unless you have a particularly pretentious killer on your hands.”

“Like that one in New Orleans a few years back?”

“I didn’t work that case. I was still ignoring Jack’s calls then. How do you even know about that?”

“I was a model patient until you disrupted my captivity, Will. I had privileges, newspapers, occasionally visitors. Never the one I wanted, but enough to keep me informed about the world.”

Will feels a brief ache, a tug at his heart, the perpetual split of wishing he’d come to Hannibal sooner, and being unable to regret the years with Molly. He brushes invisible crumbs off his sleeve as a distraction, to let the moment pass before he continues in a brighter tone. “Go on, then. Lay a little more pretentious storytelling on me. Orpheus would have come through here on his way to hell? And Persephone?”

Hannibal nods. “Both of them, yes. Orpheus had to play the dog to sleep. Persephone wouldn’t have had to. She was a guest.”

“A captive, I thought.”

“Pick your retelling. There’ve been so many. I like to think she came of her own accord. That she was in love.”

He would. Will leans over and curls his fingers around Hannibal’s wrist, a gentle caress. “Maybe she did. Maybe she was. Stranger things have happened. Maybe she learned to like pomegranates. And the dark. And dogs with three heads. It’s beautiful here. Maybe they were happy.”

“Perhaps.”  Hannibal meets Will’s eyes for a moment, and eventually he turns back to their lunch. “Here. Try one of these, they’re not bad. I make them better, though.”

He holds out some sort of bite-size appetizer and Will takes it in his mouth, savors and swallows it before laughing. “Of course you do. I can’t decide what’s more unbearable, how highly you think of your own cooking or the fact that you’re almost always right. Or that you’ve turned me into a snob, too.”

They change the subject together, in sync on this as in so many other things, and pass the rest of the afternoon in exploring and drawing and planning the rest of their stay.  Hannibal insists on doing a sketch or two of Will, who still doesn’t particularly like playing artist’s model but has also learned not to fight it. 

They leave in time to get back to the hotel and change for dinner.   Will vaguely takes note of a car in the distance behind them, at the very edge of the horizon, and squints into the rearview mirror, trying to determine if it’s the same one that arrived with them. It falls out of sight before he can decide, so he lets it go and goes back to flipping through Hannibal’s sketchbook, trying to decide which of the drawings he wants to frame as a souvenir when they get home.

Over the next few days he keeps Abigail’s warning in mind --  _ pay attention  _  -- but whatever he’s supposed to be paying attention to, unless it’s excellent food and beautiful architecture, he’s missing it.


	16. Chapter 16

_ Three Years: Naples _

Will’s on his own for the afternoon when it happens.

Hannibal’s fallen down some sort of rabbit hole of tracking down a rare recording of something or other. Will’s been ignoring the details since he knows once Hannibal actually finds it he’ll be subjected to a lengthy lecture on the history of the piece and the artists before Hannibal actually plays it for him.  Will played along at first but he’s decided to skip any further visits to dusty specialty music shops, in favor of a rare afternoon spent on his own.

With Hannibal taking the rental car Will’s limited to walking distance from the hotel but that’s not exactly a hardship.  He goes for a walk, people-watching and peering in store windows.  

As much as it’s good to be living in France where he speaks the language functionally if not fluently, there’s something to be said for being back in a place where he doesn’t speak the language at all.  Less for his brain to snag on, trying of its own accord to piece together the threads of some stranger’s life, wants and fears, things he has no desire to know but sometimes can’t turn off.  There’s plenty to be picked up off wordless prompts if he’s trying, but it’s easier to keep under control.

Eventually he finds a cafe and settles down for coffee and some sort of pastry approximately the size of his head.  It’s sort of like lunch, or like what he would have considered lunch a few lives ago.  He considers texting a picture to Hannibal just to horrify him, but he’s not entirely sure the man wouldn’t drop everything and hurry back to feed him a proper well-balanced meal with actual food groups in it.  And that would ruin the afternoon for both of them.

Instead Will takes out the book he’s been carrying, props it open on the table, and loses himself in reading for a while.  Or he tries to.  The concentration doesn’t seem to be there today, and eventually he realizes he’s read the same paragraph several times and retained almost none of it.  

He lets his attention drift away, one finger holding the book open to mark the page he’s utterly failing to read, and looks out onto the foot traffic on the sidewalk for a while.  Eventually he turns to catch a server’s eye for more coffee, and  _ something _ pulls at his attention but he’s not sure what.  Something that freezes him for a moment, making him forget the words he needs.  Fortunately the server is used to tongue-tied Americans and walks him through the request easily enough.

Will turns back to his book and spreads it open again, but his gaze doesn’t quite touch the page.  He takes a deep breath and tries to summon up something he hasn’t had to use in a while and listens for the whir of the pendulum, like unseen wings.

It’s not the pendulum he gets, not exactly.  He’s not recreating here, he’s just trying to simplify.  Take away the extraneous until he can figure out what’s nibbling at the edges of his mind.  

Subtract the cheerful, helpful server.  _ Whir _ .  Subtract the bright displays of pastries and beverages.  _ Whir _ .  A quick scan of signs on the wall - was it something there?  No, he doesn’t think so. Take them away too.  _ Whir _ .

The people, then.  Something there.

He leaves his book and his plate to hold his table and heads to the restroom, trying to quietly categorize who he sees along the way.  No one immediately jumps out at him but he thinks maybe the man sitting against the wall is following his passage through the cafe with his eyes.  Maybe.

He locks the door behind him and sags against it for a minute, suddenly aware of his dry throat and his heartbeat starting to speed. He feels hunted, and the worst part is it could be nothing.  Could be any of his random panic attacks, triggered for no good reason.  They’re very rare these days but that’s not to say gone.

He splashes some cold water on his wrists and finds himself almost afraid to meet his own eyes in the mirror, but when he looks up it’s just him.  A Hannibal-designed version of him, a little more tailored, hair a bit less of a disaster, bearded to help disguise the scar, but still just Will.

He’ll go back out to the table and see what there is to see and then decide if he’s in trouble or if he’s going crazy again. He opens the door and heads back out into the cafe and is almost relieved to see that same man tracking his walk back to his table.   _ Not _ crazy, then.

Although Abigail’s sitting across from his seat, so maybe  _ slightly _ crazy.  

He can’t strike up a conversation with her in the middle of a cafe but he knows why she’s there.  He thinks  _ I’m paying attention now _ and she smiles and he’s oddly reassured that she’s there. Will opens his book again, turns the page idly, sips at his coffee, and tries to place the face.  Has he seen that man anywhere?  Maybe, but if he has, it’s enough to snag at the part of his mind where Abigail lives but not enough for him to place.  

Will pulls out his phone and flicks through a few things on the screen, checking email, checking the weather, until he can try to angle his phone enough to take a quick, awkwardly-angled picture.  It’s not the world’s best likeness but maybe it’ll do.

He pauses over the phone screen, trying to decide if he really wants to set in motion what he might be about to set in motion.  If he’s really sure enough that he’s not just worried about nothing.  He considers the alternative, and Abigail’s presence both warning and reassuring at once, and he starts to type.

_ Does this guy look at all familiar to you? _

It takes a few minutes for a response. Of course it does.  Hannibal is probably knee-deep in some sort of ecstatic frenzy of musical appreciation somewhere.  Will flips another page, finishes his pastry, drinks more coffee.  Not that he needs anything to put more energy into his system; his fight-or-flight instincts are revving up hard.

Finally the phone buzzes:

_ I might have seen him in the market a few days ago. Or someone who looked similar. I remember a terrible shirt more than the face.  Is everything all right? _

Of  _ course _ Hannibal remembers a damn shirt.  Which is no help at all if you’re being followed over multiple days.  Will answers:

_ Not sure yet.  Keep your phone close?  I’ll let you know _ .

He takes his time getting ready to leave, signalling that he’s going to do so.  Digging money out of his wallet to leave on the table.  Putting his book away.  Scraping the chair against the floor as he stands up.  Abigail winces at the sound, and when he blinks she’s gone.

He tries to leave much the way he came in, at a pace neither slow nor brisk, watching people and dogs and stopping to look in store windows.  He walks a block, and another block, and then makes a right-hand turn.  He tries to be very casual about glancing over his shoulder when he turns.  He tries to betray nothing more than idle sightseers’ curiosity.

He’s not crazy.  He’s being followed. It’s a relief to  _ know _ .

He pulls his phone back out of his pocket and dials.  The phone gets halfway through a single ring before Hannibal picks up:

“Will?”

“You need to come back.  How far away are you?”

“I’m on my way already.  Fifteen minutes, maybe.”

“How far if you drive like a normal law-abiding human being?”

“Twenty.” 

“I can drag this out an extra five minutes.  Don’t get into an accident, okay?  I need you. And the car.”

He can almost hear Hannibal’s irritation through the phone.  It would be amusing if the situation weren’t quite so concerning. Although Will’s feeling steadily less panicked now that he knows for sure he’s not imagining things, and now that he’s reached Hannibal.

“I will consider driving slowly if you tell me exactly what’s happening.”

“I’m being followed. Maybe we both are, if you saw him before.  He’s keeping his distance and he’s not bad but he’s not an expert. Probably not law enforcement.  Private citizen with an eye for interesting people, most likely.”

Hannibal’s silent for a minute, digesting that, planning whatever it is he’s planning.  Will’s not entirely sure what he himself is planning, just that he has absolutely no intention of being turned in.  Or of leading the man to their hotel, if he doesn’t already know where it is.

When Hannibal speaks he sounds grim. “Can you lose him?”

“I could.  Not right here but if I go somewhere a bit busier.  But he may already know where we’re staying.”  Will hesitates but only for a second.  There’s a moment here where this could go any one of several different ways.  They could run. But the thump of his heart has slid from panic to anger while he’s been speaking to Hannibal and he doesn’t want to run anymore. “I think we should find out what he knows and whether he’s already sold us.  Where can I lead him?”

“Keep him busy.  I’ll find somewhere and call you.  Don’t do anything rash before I arrive, Will.”

Will feels suddenly, inappropriately, giddy.  He’s tempted to ask  _ or what? _ , but bites it back. 

“Okay.  I don’t think he’s in any hurry, he’s just watching me take a walk. I can take a nice slow one.  Stop for more coffee if I need to.  Any general idea what part of town I should be aiming for?”

“I’m thinking there may be something quiet near the water where we were walking on Saturday.  Can you get him that far?”

“We’ll see if he’s sufficiently motivated.  He just spent half an hour watching me eat a glorified danish, so he’s got time on his hands. Call me when you know where you want me to go.”

Will ends the call and with it his pretense of being overly interested in the shirts in a shop window, shoves the phone in his pocket, and sets off down the street again with his blood roaring in his ears.

It’s a nice day for a leisurely walk.


	17. Chapter 17

_ Three Years: Naples _

It’s almost meditative.  The steady pace of feet on pavement, not too fast, not too slow.  Hands in his pockets, sun shining down, taking in the sights of the city, keeping half an eye on reflections to be sure he’s still being followed.  

Hannibal’s somewhere ahead, or will be by the time he gets there.  Something will happen, and Will’s not entirely sure yet what it is but he knows he’s walking into it willingly and he knows he wants it. In the meanwhile there’s nothing to do but this.  Walk, and watch, and wait.

He feels a certain inevitability.  It’s not entirely unlike the moment he got into the police car with Hannibal; the specific twists and turns ahead unclear but the general direction unspooling of its own volition from that moment, leaving him with nothing to do but hang on for dear life and ride it out.  But the fizzy butterfly feeling in his stomach was nerves then, and it’s something else now.  Something like anticipation.

Eventually, just as he’s starting to worry he’s going to run out of things to pretend to look at, his phone buzzes.  He ducks to the edge of the sidewalk, away from foot traffic, and manages to double check that his tail is still there while he’s answering.

_ "Buongiorno, caro." _

“Will.”  Hannibal conveys exasperation very well by tone of voice alone, something Will supposes he had cause to practice during those initial months when voice was all they had. “You’re enjoying this. I don’t object to you enjoying yourself but would prefer you wait until I’m there to watch your back.”

“So tell me where you are.”  Hannibal gives him directions.  Will keeps Hannibal on the phone while he walks. “Who do you think our new friend is?  One of Alana’s?”

“If Alana’s people ever find us, we won’t have this much warning, I’m afraid. The Verger fortune can surely hire a better trained class of personnel.  I imagine we just caught the attention of someone who pays attention and has a good memory for faces.”

“Possibly we should go back to giving Italy a wide berth for a while longer.”

“Possibly.”  Hannibal sighs and Will’s almost sure that he’s bemoaning the loss of the food.  So unpredictable in some ways and so utterly predictable in others.  Infuriating, beloved man.  Will won’t allow anyone to endanger him or take him away; he’ll rip the man following him to shreds with his teeth before he’ll let that happen. 

Will finally catches sight of Hannibal up ahead, leaning against the side of a building, near the entrance to an alley, turned to face away.  He still knows it’s Hannibal; would know him from any angle by now.  “I see you.  I’ll be there in a minute or so.  What do you want me to do?”

“Walk on by, please.  No stopping, as much as I would like to see you right now. Turn right at the corner and round the block.  When you get back here, come on into the alley and meet me.  If anything seems amiss, just keep walking until you’re safely away and wait for me to call.”

His stomach clenches briefly at the thought of walking away and leaving Hannibal to face whatever it is they’re meant to be facing together.  “You know I wouldn’t.”

“I choose to believe you will because I’m asking you to. I’m hanging up now, I’ll need both hands.”

“Be careful, Hannibal.”  Will’s fairly certain the request comes too late after the line’s already dead, but he’s so close now perhaps Hannibal can hear his voice.  He resists the urge to reach out and brush against him as he passes by.  He keeps walking.

He hears nothing out of the ordinary.  The street has fairly quiet foot traffic, but there are some people around and he doesn’t see any reactions that indicate anyone’s noticed anything happening behind him.  Maybe it hasn’t happened yet.  Will keeps walking, and does not allow himself to look back as he rounds the corner.

He does allow his feet to speed up as he walks the rest of the way around the block, taking no  notice of his surroundings at all. When he turns back to the original street, nothing appears to be out of the ordinary.  He holds his breath as he steps into the alley, from the sunlit street into the shadows of the tall buildings.

The car is there.  Hannibal’s waiting for him.  If you weren’t Will, you’d have no idea anything unusual had happened.  But Will reads Hannibal like a book these days.  His hair’s a little out of place.  He’s perhaps breathing just a little heavily.  Will slides into the passenger seat and casts a glance into the back seat, which is empty.  He asks, though he doesn’t really need to, “Trunk?”

“I’m afraid I had to sacrifice the picnic blanket to preserve the integrity of the rental car.”

Will could laugh with the absurdity of it, but he bites back the urge, suspecting the laugh would come out semi-hysterical.  He just asks, “Where are we going?”

“We’re improvising.”

It’s not precisely an answer and Will doesn’t push for one.  He knows perfectly well improvising isn’t Hannibal’s comfort zone.  A fuzzy picnic blanket instead of sterile plastic, a broad-daylight kidnapping instead of a quiet late-night break-in, the man in the trunk a puzzle rather than a carefully vetted prey.  Whatever they’re doing here, it’s closer to the Dragon than anything else.  Closer to Will’s monster than Hannibal’s.  If he listened, he suspects he could hear the monster stirring under his skin.

They drive in silence, out past the city limits, onto side roads, looking for some quiet, uninhabited place.  Will rests a hand silently on Hannibal’s thigh, for the warmth and the contact.  When he doesn’t need both hands to drive, Hannibal drops his hand to cover Will’s.  It’s a quiet drive, both comfortable and charged.  They should probably be using it to plan, but Will’s so oddly content that he doesn’t feel any desire to break the silence.

Eventually, by some combination of luck and Hannibal’s instinct and Will’s scanning a map on his phone for areas that look relatively empty, they find what is to all appearances an abandoned and crumbling old house.  Hannibal stays with the car while Will goes to look around.  He concocts a half-assed story about car trouble, should he run into anyone, and should that someone speak enough English for him to get the story out, but it proves unnecessary.  He can’t find any sign that anyone’s been there recently.

He scouts around and finds a few things he suspects Hannibal’s going to want, makes a neat little pile, and then returns to where Hannibal’s leaning against the car.  Hair re-ordered, perfectly casual, perfectly calm.

Will feels an unaccountable, inappropriate-under-the-circumstances, nearly-irresistible desire to muss Hannibal’s hair again.  Of all things to be wanting to do, right now.   _ Keep it together, _ he tells himself, and shoves his hands in his pockets to prevent them from reaching out in spite of his best efforts.

“It’s empty.  Looks like it’s been that way for a while,” he reports.  “I found some rope. I thought we might need it.”

Hannibal looks at him like he hung the moon, and it gets even harder not to want to ruffle his composure a little.  He nods toward the trunk of the car and asks Will, “Should we talk about what we’re intending here?  This has already gone too far; we’re going to have to cut our vacation short.”

Will’s figured out that much and nods.  “Not until we find out what he knows and who he’s told it to.  If we can go home or if that’s unsafe too.  Maybe he’s just some unlucky guy who thought we looked familiar and got curious.  If so, we…”  He shrugs, a little uncertain. “I think we let him go.  Leave him here so we have time to get away, but we can’t… not just for that.”

Hannibal nods and his eyes don’t leave Will’s for a second as he asks, “And otherwise?”

Will’s hands in his pockets curl into fists. “Otherwise, he compromised our life. That’s not forgivable.”  He hears the words fall from his mouth, he knows he’s maybe pronouncing a death sentence, and a shiver licks up his spine.  He doesn’t take them back. He made a choice a long time ago;  _ this life, at all costs, _ even if he hadn’t explicitly thought at the time that the costs might not be only his own to pay.

Hannibal has the most reassuring smile at the oddest times.  He presses a hand to Will’s cheek and Will fights the urge to lean into it like a puppy.  “You are the most remarkable thing,” Hannibal says, and Will gives in to that urge to lean in after all.  “All those years ago, I used to wonder what you would become, given time and space to bloom.  I anticipated a variety of possibilities, but I failed to predict your protective drive.  That you might rouse to this only in the service of guarding what’s yours.”

They should be getting on with this.  They really should.  But Will wants to hear more of the implicit acknowledgement that Hannibal is  _ his, _ though that’s not exactly news.  “Are you disappointed?”

“Not a bit.  It suits you.  You always were territorial. I like it better here on the inside of those boundaries you protect so fiercely.”

Will’s filled to bursting with a riot of emotions, some of which contradict each other, but at the center of it all there’s a core of quiet, still, utter peace like he hasn’t felt maybe since the cliff.  The two of them together, defending what it took them so long to build for themselves.

He sighs, steadies himself, and reaches up to take the hand that’s resting on his cheek so gently.  He squeezes Hannibal’s fingers with his own and then steps back, feeling in his pocket for the knife that always lives there.  He doesn’t have to ask if Hannibal has his own; they always carry them.  And there’s a spare in the glove compartment should it be needed.  He thinks wryly that it’s a good thing they don’t keep the spare in the trunk.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

They move, as one, for the car.


	18. Chapter 18

_ Three Years: Naples _

It doesn’t take much work to get the man out of the trunk and headed toward the house.  Not that he wouldn’t  _ like _ to make a break for it, clearly, but there’s no promising escape route and he seems to have a pretty good idea of who the two men staring down at him are.  And why they’re holding sharp, gleaming blades.

He goes without a fight, but with a stream of what sounds like some combination of pleading and wheedling and bargaining.

In fucking  _ Italian. _

Will doesn’t take his eyes off their guest but he says loud enough for Hannibal to hear him, “Next time we go somewhere I don’t speak the language, let’s switch up the language lessons a little bit, okay?  Nothing we practiced is going to do me any good here, this is all you.”

If he wanted to order a cappuccino, or interrogate the man about walking directions to the Teatro di San Carlo, he’d be all set.  For “who the fuck are you and can you give me a really good reason why we should let you walk out of here alive, because if you’ve made it so I have to abandon my dogs it’s not going to end well for you?” Will’s got...pretty much nothing.  He could probably manage “you”, and “dogs.”

“Vacation, my ass,” he mutters under his breath, and holds the door open in some bizarre parody of chivalry for Hannibal and their shadow.  He catches the glint of amusement in Hannibal’s gaze as he passes by, with a murmured  _ grazie, _ and oh, there’s a catch in his throat that might be laughter or love or nerves or some alchemical combination of the three.

Hannibal nudges their captive toward the chair Will’s set near the middle of the room, and says something to him in Italian that gets him sitting down, shaking, and Will doesn’t know much Italian but he thinks he catches  _ prego _ and remembers that’s a variant of  _ please. _ Damn language with a half dozen different ways to say  _ please. _

“Will, would you --”

“On it.”  Will’s already moving toward the coil of rope.  He can’t translate but he can tie a damn good knot.  _ We’re a good team for this too, _ he thinks, and the thought pleases him more than it should.  Although they’re so far past “should” here that he might as well drop the word from his vocabulary.

Will kneels behind the chair and begins to carefully thread and work the rope, and glances up at Hannibal over the line of their captive’s shoulder.  “I suppose,” he says conversationally, “that you could pass along my apologies for the rope.  It’s coarser than I’d like for this.  Likely to hurt a bit.  But that would probably just be confusing.  Mixed messages.”

That gets him just the tiniest twitch of the muscles at the corner of Hannibal’s mouth, but it’s close enough to a smile.  “If you decide to let him live, we’ll apologize then,  _ caro," _ Hannibal responds, and Will doesn’t miss the  _ you. _

They’re doing this together but Hannibal’s going to defer to him on the final decision.  The life and death of a man he can’t even communicate with directly is in his hands and it should feel like a weighty responsibility, but it feels heady and powerful.  He tugs at the first set of knots to be sure it’s going to hold, and is pleased with his work.  He moves to work on the man’s legs and says, “You might as well go ahead.  I won’t ask you to play full-time translator, but keep me updated on the broad strokes, please?”

“Of course. It’s only polite.”  Hannibal looks like it hurts him a bit to drag his eyes away from Will and back to the man in the chair, but he does it, and then launches into something in Italian.  He sounds calm, curious, detached - he sounds like a therapy session, Will realizes, and shuts his eyes briefly against the flood of memories that thought brings back.  

Will finishes up his work on the ropes and stands up again, backing up but staying behind the chair and off to the side.  It may be useful to be out of sight, and he wants to watch Hannibal.  He tries to follow anything at all of the conversation at first, but gives up quickly. He recognizes just enough words - the name of the street their hotel is located on, Hannibal’s own name and Will’s, an occasional simple noun - to realize he has no idea what’s stringing them together.

Eventually Hannibal pauses with what Will is almost sure is a polite, “Excuse me,” to the man in the chair, and turns his attention back to Will.  “His name is Matteo. He wasn’t being particularly forthcoming at first, but he seems to have figured out that his chances of coming out of this are better if he tells us the truth.  Apparently the media coverage has him convinced we’re not very nice people.  Can you imagine?”

Now that the ball is rolling, they’re safely out in the middle of nowhere, and Will’s done his magic with the rope, Hannibal’s relaxed a bit from his earlier overprotective state.  He sounds amused.  He’s always found their news coverage more entertaining than Will does, perhaps because he’s had many more years to appreciate his own press clippings, even if they used to have “Ripper” in place of “Lecter.”

Will often finds that fairly charming but at the moment he’s just keyed up.  “He probably read Freddie’s book. I swear, that woman --”

Hannibal’s looking at Will and doesn’t catch the flicker of tension that runs through their captive’s frame, but Will does.  He plays the sentence back and then tries it again: “Freddie Lounds?  From, what is it here,  _ Crimine _ something or other?”

The man does it again, undeniably.  He knows the name.

Will rolls his eyes to the cobwebbed ceiling, mutters, “I will kill her for real next time and I will do it with my bare fucking hands,” and then says, “Go on.  Find out what that’s about.”

There’s a longer back-and-forth, then, and Will grits his teeth and does not interrupt even though he really,  _ really _ needs to know what on God’s green earth any of this has to do with Freddie.  Hannibal gets closer in then, looming over the man in the chair, and he gets preternaturally still.  It’s scarier than any amount of rage would be, Will thinks, or he would have thought so once upon a time, when he was a different Will.

Eventually Hannibal steps back and moves to take his coat off and sling it over another chair.  Will supposes that’s answer enough, but he asks anyway.  “Well?”

“Apparently he recognized us a few days ago. Recognized me, first. I’m afraid I’m a bit more notorious in this country than you are.”

“ _ Il mio Mostro," _ Will offers with something resembling tenderness, out of place as it is in this room. Hannibal’s eyes meet his brightly.  His very own monster, indeed.

“He was trying to stay clean of any real entanglement.  Badly, obviously.  He didn’t want to call the authorities and get pulled into a mess.”

“So, fucking  _ Freddie." _

“Ms. Lounds, yes.  He sent her one picture, so far, and he was going to send more once he heard back.  Perhaps you would be so kind as to take the phone from his pocket and see what’s there.  The code is 06475.  The good news is that he hasn’t gotten any response.”

Will fishes in the man’s pocket for his phone and thinks rapidly through the implications.  “The bad news is, that may mean Freddie isn’t on top of her email or dismissed him as a crank, or it may mean she already passed the photo on to the FBI.  Does Freddie strike you as someone to pass up any possibility of a sighting?”

“I doubt it.  She was always a tenacious reporter, if perhaps one of dubious morals.”

Will’s never fully understood why Hannibal finds Freddie so amusing.  He’d swear the man’s almost fond of her in some odd way, and he doesn’t know how to explain it except perhaps that there’s some sort of kinship of the amoral.  Will supposes he’s one of the amoral now, and wonders if he’d bristle quite so much at Freddie if they were to meet again.  Perhaps he’ll find out, eventually.

For now he unlocks and skims through the photos on the phone.  There are six or seven of them, taken over the past week or so on at least three different days.  “We’re slipping not to have seen him sooner,” he says half to himself.  “Getting too comfortable.”  He pokes around further and finds evidence of only one email, to MurderHusbandSightings@tattlecrime.net, with no response yet.  Which doesn’t mean anything; he could have other email accounts not connected to this phone, there could be other photos already downloaded and deleted from the phone.  

He does open the emailed photo to find it’s one of the two of them in the market a few days earlier, caught frozen over a display of fruit.  He remembers the moment; they’d been having a ridiculous argument about apples, of all things.  Still, he looks happy.  They both do.  He’s almost tempted to forward the damn thing to his own email account; photos of the two of them together are not exactly a thing they seek out, for obvious reasons.  He resists the urge and drops the phone into his own pocket for later disposal.  

Later on he’ll realize that gesture was the decision point; the moment he knew Matteo wasn’t going to be needing his phone anymore.  

Matteo and Hannibal have started talking again while Will was occupied, the bound man’s voice getting louder and more urgent, but Will’s mostly tuned them out.  He tunes back in now and asks Hannibal for an update.

Hannibal eyes him almost speculatively before responding.  “He’s currently attempting to convince me that he poses no real threat.  He knows where we’re staying, and where we’ve been spending time, but not much else.  I think he’s being truthful, but a little pressure to ensure it would be wise. You’ve had self defense training, yes?”

“Not recently.”  He did, of course, as a police officer and then later with the FBI.  He knows how to defend himself.  He knows how to hurt back when being attacked.  None of those lessons were intended to apply to defending oneself against a man tied to a chair, but a broken finger is a broken finger.  “I could wing it.  It won’t be quite as elegant as you would prefer.  I lack your precision.”  

He’s thinking of Mason Verger, that odd, charged night in Wolf Trap.  The casual, specific brutality of Hannibal’s hands twisting his neck just so, to leave him alive but broken precisely the way Hannibal wanted him. Will can’t do that.  It’s not what his monster is made of.

“I’ve only ever wanted you to be yourself, Will.  You were never meant to be my mirror.  Do as you wish.”  

That’s not precisely true and they both know it, but Will doesn’t argue the point.  The version of Hannibal that had once wanted to turn Will into his image feels as long ago as the version of Will that would never have contemplated this room, this afternoon.

Will closes his eyes briefly, thinks about all the ways he was taught  _ not _ to move his hands in the service of keeping bones unbroken, and thinks about the reversal of those movements.  The fragility of fingerbones, their weak points.  He drops back to his knees behind the chair and studies Matteo’s hands, feeling a vague sense of relief that there’s no wedding ring.  Perhaps they’re not depriving anyone of a husband or a father.  He reaches for the right hand and when it clenches into a fist, he uncurls it almost gently before selecting a finger, the index one, which he studies carefully for a moment.  

He doesn’t look up from it as he tells Hannibal, “Please inform Matteo that he could still walk out of here if he convinces you he doesn’t know any more than that, and hasn’t told anyone else about us.”

“Could he?”

Will doesn’t look up when he says simply, “No.”  He doesn’t think he could actually survive seeing what Hannibal’s expression might be.  He might turn to ash or stone or flame at the sight.  

Hannibal says something in Italian and Will can only assume it’s a translation.  He still doesn’t look up, narrowing his world to Matteo’s finger resting in Will’s own surprisingly steady hands.  He notes a slight huskiness to Hannibal’s voice, and a hopeful tilt to Matteo’s when he responds. He asks, “Do we believe him?”

“Not entirely.”

“Are you just telling me that to see what I’ll do?”

“You know me so terribly well.”  Hannibal’s voice is a caress and Will still doesn’t look up.  He doesn’t point out that the answer was neither a no, nor a yes.

He just presses, and it takes so little, really.  It should be harder to snap a bone.  People shouldn’t be so fragile.  People shouldn’t be able to make the sound Matteo makes, a sort of yell mixed with a whimper, as his hand jerks from Will’s.

Will drops his hands to his thighs and stays on the ground as he says, “Ask again.”

Hannibal does, and listens to the sobbing answer, and tells Will, “I think I believe him.  It’s almost a pity.  I would like to see you do that again.”

For the briefest moment Will entertains the notion of doing it again for no other reason than that Hannibal wants to see it.  He considers being that kind of monster, and then decides not to be.  He’s feeling his way through uncharted territory here, but that doesn’t feel like the right move.

He looks up from the ground, finally, and is glad he waited so long to do it.  He can barely stand to be looked at the way Hannibal’s looking at him right now, much less the way he probably was two minutes ago.  He suddenly feels how tight his neck and shoulder muscles are pulled, and tilts his neck slowly to one side and then the other before saying, “It sounds like we’re done here.  Unless you think there’s something more you can get.”

“No, I don’t think he knows much.  Just enough to reach out to Ms. Lounds.  They’ll be able to trace us to the hotel, but no farther.”  They travel under fake names, partly for these reasons.  If Hannibal’s IDs are airtight enough, and Will has no reason to think they aren't, they can simply vanish once they leave the hotel and return their rental car. Buy train tickets with cash to get home, perhaps with a stopover in another city to confuse the trail.

Will gets to his feet and comes around to the front of the chair, avoiding actually looking at Matteo.  He leans his head against Hannibal’s shoulder and finds himself talking quietly, almost whispering, even though he knows he won’t be understood.  “We’ll send Freddie the message that she should stop encouraging these people, but he shouldn’t suffer for it.  How do I do it without hurting him more than I have to?”

Hannibal’s arm comes up around him, warm and steadying, and Will leans into it, calm as the eye of a storm.  “If I were doing it myself,” Hannibal breathes into Will’s hair, “I would aim under the ribcage, for a lung or the heart, from the back.  That requires precision, though.  If you’re willing to let him see it coming, the heart from the front.  If you’d prefer he not see it, the throat, from behind.”

_ Like Abigail, _ Will thinks, and feels the phantom pain of that night in Hannibal’s house.  It hadn’t been fast or painless for her, but then perhaps Hannibal hadn’t meant for it to be that time.

He breathes in for a moment, securely held against Hannibal’s side, and considers asking  _ will we be different after this? Will you love me any more, or any less? _  But he doesn’t ask.  They’ll be different, but not unrecognizable. Not after all these years.  So he just says, “I love you. And you should probably step back or ruin your new shoes.”  

He steps away, back behind the chair, and then says, “Talk to him.  Distract him.  I don’t care what.  Tell him we’re letting him go.  Recite Dante if you want to.  Just keep him from knowing before he has to.”

Hannibal turns his eyes back to Matteo and starts to talk again, walking away but making it look fairly natural.  More “stretching my legs” and less “my husband is about to bleed you and I really like these pants.”

Will’s palms feel a little clammy.  He wipes them absently against his leg and then slides his knife back out of his pocket.  He breathes deep and feels his heart thumping and tries to narrow the world again to the bare minimum.  His hands, the blade, the vulnerable nape of Matteo’s neck where he’s going to grab the hair and draw his head back.  Quickly, quickly.  This is a consequence, and a message, but it’s not vengeance.

_ No one ever said a monster couldn’t try to be merciful, _ Will thinks, and he steps forward and moves fluidly, left hand in Matteo’s hair and right hand at his throat, and the blade bites deep and hard and Will tries to make it fast, he tries to make it not be Abigail all over again, he tries not to hear the harsh gurgling sound.  There’s blood warm on his hand and he hears Hannibal’s voice stumble and come to a halt, and then there’s only quiet.

Quiet, and his own breath, and finally Hannibal again:  _ "Caro. Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.” _

Will’s lost his voice for a minute, but he steadies, slowly, hand on the back of the chair now, his breath ragged around the edges like a sob.  He feels hot and cold all at the same time, himself and something new, and he sees Hannibal through a few tears that seem to have gathered unbidden in his eyelashes.

Finally he steps backward, more of a stagger than anything else, and manages to gasp out, “You know I don’t know what the hell you just said, you asshole.”

Hannibal moves then, breaking the spell of the stillness of the room, and gathers Will up into his arms.  He tugs Will gently, like something precious and breakable, over to one of the other rickety chairs and down onto his lap.  They sit there for more minutes than they can probably afford, Hannibal smoothing warm and comforting hands over Will’s back and arms and hair, and telling him in some languages Will knows and some that he doesn’t, that he is perfect and loved.  He doesn’t seem to care that Will’s bloody hand is twisting a crimson handprint into his shirt.

Finally Will’s heartbeat and breath slow, and he feels enough like himself to stretch and shift from where he must be putting Hannibal’s leg to sleep with his dead weight.  He doesn’t look over at the chair and its perfectly still occupant, who longer needs his phone.  He unwinds his fingers from Hannibal’s shirt and says, “I’m okay now. Take me home.”

He slides back to a standing position and wipes his hand as clean as he can on a rag, while Hannibal gets his coat and buttons it over the ruined shirt.  He twines his clean hand with Hannibal’s and does not look back as they leave the abandoned building together.


	19. Chapter 19

_ Three Years: Naples and Rouen and Points Between _

Hannibal takes over the logistics of getting from here to there: the hotel and the car and the train tickets, the unnecessary transfers in case they are being followed, the disposal of ruined clothes and the provision of food and just about everything else.  Will lets him and for once doesn’t push back just to see where the boundaries are, or for the fun of it. It’s not in him to be meek as a lamb permanently, nor would Hannibal want him to be, but for right now he’s relieved to just exist and let anything beyond that be Hannibal’s problem.

Will sinks into his own mind and tests what he finds there, eyes focused idly on countryside rolling by, but taking in very little.  He feels rather as if he’s taking stock of his own blood cells, neurons, his shifty slippery sense of self that if he were a religious man he might call a soul.   _ Is it all still there?  Am I different? Is it terrible if I am? Is it terrible if I’m not? _

What he is, he decides eventually, is someone who knows himself better than he did yesterday.  Yesterday he had a sense of what he thought he would do and far he would go to protect Hannibal and the life they’ve built.  Now he knows for certain.  Knowledge at a high cost, but knowledge nonetheless. He scours the inside of his head for regret and finds regret at the necessity of his actions, but not at the actions themselves.  

He also finds a small part of himself that doesn’t care about any of it except the way that Hannibal had looked at him, so much like that night on the cliff.  A part that wishes they’d done it together. A part of him that wonders if he might want to do it again.  Not anytime soon, not at home, not, please god, in any way having anything to do with Freddie Lounds, but...maybe.  He pushes that aside for consideration at some later date. Some much,  _ much _ later date.

He knows perfectly well Hannibal washed Will’s hands perfectly clean for him at the hotel, checked under his fingernails, any fleck of evidence shuld be gone.  He smells phantom blood anyway, throughout the evening.

Once in a while he emerges from his thoughts long enough to reassure Hannibal that he’s fundamentally fine, safe and unbroken, not even feeling panicky, just… thinking.  When he does swim to the surface of his mind he always finds Hannibal’s hand on him, or his eyes watching him like he’s just performed a miracle, or both. It could be disconcerting if he let it, but he leans into it instead and lets Hannibal’s blatant adoration enfold him. Will doesn’t seem to have the ability to form words, really, beyond the occasional yes or no, but Hannibal’s intervention smooths the way and he doesn’t really need to muster up any others.

They stop overnight in some little way station. Will doesn’t know or care what the town’s name is.  He cares about taking a shower, a long hot one, and he worries about what he might dream. But when he slips away, held close against the steady lullabye of Hannibal’s terribly human heart, he doesn’t dream at all.  He sleeps right through, and wakes up safe and warm and finds that he finally has words again when he rolls over and finds himself observed.

He stretches and then curls back up again into the indentation in the lumpy hotel mattress and tests out his voice with, “Hey.  Did you sleep at all?”

“I slept enough. I’ll nap on the train if I need to.”  Hannibal watches him for a moment longer and then presses his mouth to Will’s shoulder before continuing: “I didn’t speak for years, as a boy.  I’m glad you found your voice sooner.  I’d have missed it terribly.”

“It wasn’t really gone. Just in hiding for a little while.  I had thinking to do.  Yesterday was…”  He searches for a word before settling on “...intense.”  It’s not nearly encompassing enough but it will do.  

“Perfect,” Hannibal says firmly, yet again.  “You were magnificent.  And clever. And  _ beautiful, caro _ .”  The word  _ beautiful  _ ripples with unspoken echoes.

Will doesn’t take praise particularly well, still, even after all these years of it.  The instinct to duck and hide away remains.  He squirms a little and defuses the moment by countering, “I’m fairly certain that nothing that ends in us running away and covering our tracks is perfect.  We’re getting careless.  It shouldn’t have come to any of this.”

“Would you like me to be sorry that it did?”  Hannibal doesn’t sound even remotely sorry, and Will’s pretty sure his rendition of it would be unconvincing if he tried.

“I’d be foolish to ask you to pretend, wouldn’t I?”  Will sighs and shifts closer, for warmth and for comfort and perhaps in a little while for pleasure, but not just yet.  “I’m not even sorry myself, not like I should be.  I’m sorry that I’m not sorrier.  He probably had a family. Friends. A life. Hell, he might have had a dog.”

“I’m sure someone will notice he’s missing and check on the dog.”

For some reason it’s that, that dispels any lingering tension.  Because sure, Will Graham killed a man, in semi-cold blood and partly for the thrill of letting Hannibal  _ see _ him do it even if it wasn’t the primary reason.  But he’s worried about whether Matteo’s  _ dog _ might be hungry somewhere.

He doesn’t quite laugh, it’s a little too close and too raw for that, but he drops his face into the curve of Hannibal’s throat and sighs and shakes his head there, against Hannibal’s pulse, feeling the last of his stored-up tension leave his body.  “There is something very, very wrong with the both of us.”

Hannibal does laugh, warm and throaty and rumbling under Will’s cheek and palm, and replies, “Quite a bit, apparently.  There’s a small cottage industry writing books and articles on the subject.  I propose we leave them to analyzing us and not worry about it too much ourselves. I’m quite sure we’ll learn all about the latest professional opinions of our emotional problems the next time Frederick or Ms. Lounds gets a new book contract.”

Will opts not to think about that.  They should really be running out of book material by now, but he’s pretty sure they’ll both keep cranking out variations on the topic of I Survived Dinner With The Chesapeake Ripper And His Gay Lover as long as they possibly can.  And Will can’t even call in during their talk show appearances to complain about bisexual erasure, much less the fact that all of their so-called psychiatric analysis is completely wrong. Although he can let himself entertain the notion, once in a while, for amusement. He has quite the rant worked up, should he ever be in a position to deliver it.

He just mutters, “I hate them both. I hope their fingers fall off and they can never type again and also maybe they could get papercuts.”  Unwillingly, he moves enough to check the clock.  It’s still early.  “When’s our train?  Do we have time for breakfast?”

He barely makes a show of getting out of bed; he knows perfectly well he’s not going to be allowed, and in fact he gets all of one leg out from under the covers before a lightning-quick arm snares him back, warm and close.  “A bit after noon.  We have hours,” Hannibal tells him, and Will’s almost sure there must have been an earlier train but he’s not complaining.

“I suppose,” he lets himself drawl, falling back willingly, “that you planned it that way so we could have this conversation somewhere other than a train sleeping compartment.”

“It would have been imprudent, and I wanted you able to speak freely,” Hannibal agrees easily enough.  “Also, I thought it was possible you might have nightmares.”

“Not a nightmare in sight.”  Will suspects Hannibal knows that, if he watched him all night, but it doesn’t hurt to confirm.  “I’m quite well rested.  And with time to kill until breakfast, apparently.”  He doesn’t quite bat his eyelashes, but it’s close.

He doesn’t say  _ I’m pretty sure you’ve been dying to fuck me since I started tying Matteo to that chair, if not before _ , partly because he’s not in a particularly crude mood and partly because he doesn’t need to.  It’s blindingly obvious.  He knows what kind of monster his husband is.  He’s mostly amazed that Hannibal managed to keep the self-restraint together not to try anything with him the previous night.  Amazed, and grateful, and interested in making up for it now that he feels more like himself.

Will takes praise much better when it’s laid directly against his skin, when it comes at least partly in the form of touch instead of words, and so he lets Hannibal spend the rest of the morning pulling him the rest of the way back into his body from wherever he’d gone in his head the night before.  They do make it to the train - barely, and without breakfast, but they’re in their seats when the train pulls away and Will supposes they ate so well in Italy that skipping a meal or two won’t kill them.

There are hours of train ride left and nothing to fill them with - their hasty departure didn’t exactly leave time for picking up trashy novels or crossword puzzles - but they make do.  Hannibal does doze on and off, and Will watches scenery and looks forward to being home.  Picking up the dogs early from where they’re being boarded.  Diving deep into domesticity and not coming out for quite a while, certainly not travelling anywhere.  He might never want to leave the house again, really.

Eventually he also dozes off, and doesn’t wake up until Hannibal nudges him awake as they’re approaching their station.  They pile into a cab with their bags and head home, because Hannibal’s car is of course still at the airport.  That will have to be dealt with at some point but not, Will hopes, for a day or two.  He just wants to be  _ home _ .

Home is quieter than normal without the dogs, but it’s not entirely an unwelcome thing, just for one night.  Home also doesn’t have the normal complement of groceries, but Hannibal “throws together” something that’s almost offensively good for being an improvised scraping-things-together-from-the-pantry sort of meal.  Or possibly just tastes that way because it’s the first real meal Will’s had all day.  Or, now that he thinks about it, since...well.  Since before Matteo.

He assumes, given how many other things he’s put behind him and no longer counts in  _ days since… _ , that he will do the same with this soon.  Tomorrow and next week and next month may still be  _...since I killed a man who only barely deserved it and enjoyed it more than I should have _ , but he knows from experience that one day he’ll realize he’s lost count. Knowing makes it easier to live with.

After dinner Hannibal offers to go pick up the dogs, and that’s how Will knows he’s still being looked-after-extra-carefully, because he’s pretty sure Hannibal is delighted at the prospect of a night at home without them.  Apparently things are going to be delicate for a while.  

He could probably complain and fuss Hannibal into backing off, but the idea of being looked after isn’t entirely an unwelcome one.  So he rejects the suggestion in favor of a movie night on the couch with zero dogs to accommodate or to beg for popcorn.  Halfway through he realizes he’s just about asleep, but he manages to wake up enough to ask, “Hannibal?”

“Hmm?”   Hannibal’s paying more attention to the movie than Will is, but he glances down to where Will’s curled up at his side.

“Let’s get the dogs, but otherwise not tell anyone we’re back.  Stay out of work the whole two weeks with me.  Let’s have the rest of our vacation here.”

“Ignore the outside world for a while?”

“Mm. Yes, please.”

“I propose a compromise.  One stop tomorrow before we get the dogs, for groceries.  Let me supply the kitchen properly, and then we can spend the rest of our vacation without seeing another soul.  Is that agreeable?”

Will stays awake just long enough to nod  _ yes _ , or he thinks he does, and then he’s gone.


	20. Chapter 20

_ Three Years and Two Months: Rouen _

“We’re going to have to rejoin the world at some point, I’m afraid.”  

Will glances over to where Hannibal is sitting in the other chair on the balcony with his pre-dinner drink, lazy in the early evening heat, looking about as inclined to move as Will himself, and shrugs. “I don’t see why. Is it so terrible, having me all to yourself?”

Hannibal doesn’t answer that, but then he doesn’t need to. They both know he’d like nothing better than to have Will entirely to himself forever. It’s a bit of a miracle they aren’t living full-time on a boat; probably if it weren’t for dogs, they would be. Out on the water with no one else in sight who could possibly draw or hold Will’s attention from Hannibal.

The idea holds appeal for Will, too. Just Hannibal, and the waves and the sun, no intrusions from the outside world. No one able to sneak up or follow.

It’s not that they’re hiding out since their return, exactly. Hannibal runs his business in his usual desultory fashion, putting in just enough time with clients to make it look as if he has some legitimate work to help obscure how much of their spending comes from Swiss bank accounts or whatever Byzantine financial system the man’s set up. And it’s summer, so Will has a legitimate excuse to be taking a break from tutoring, with most of his students on break. They get groceries. They walk the dogs, although they rarely stray far from their property to do it.

They just haven’t been going to Hannibal’s operas or art galleries or fine restaurants, or even sailing or hiking for Will. Hannibal suggests something occasionally and Will generally finds some reason to postpone it. Home feels safe right now. If someone was going to trace them from Naples back to France, they'd have done it by now. If they stay here, it won't happen again. Out there in the world, he’s been reminded all too recently, there are other people. Any one of whom might turn out to have a good memory for faces. Out in the world there are dangers and temptations.

Occasionally he’s struck by, and can’t help but laugh at, the absurdity of it.  _ You’re supposed to be my paddle _ , he’d said all those years ago, and it had all been a lie. And now it’s not. With Hannibal, in their home, is the safest place to be. For Will, and for anyone else who might get too close to figuring out who they are.

But apparently Hannibal’s made a unilateral decision that it’s time to rejoin the human race, and he’s going to drag Will with him kicking and screaming if he has to.

“For one thing,” Hannibal carries on, “being too insular is almost as dangerous as being too visible. People start to wonder about the odd neighbors no one ever sees. And routines become too obvious when they’re never changed.”

Will sips at his own drink and looks out over the yard, trying to think of a response to what he admits is probably entirely correct. Paradoxically, they’ll be less noticeable if they go back to being a little more visible.

“Additionally,” Hannibal continues, unruffled at the lack of response, “a certain desire to return to the comforts of home is entirely appropriate after our experience in Italy, but it’s also important to balance it with new experiences. It’s not good for you to dwell.”  

He doesn’t say  _...on killing a man for me _ , but they both know it’s what he means. Will’s not dwelling, not exactly, but his actions sit in the back of his mind. A weighty, difficult little reminder of what he’s apparently capable of when provoked, and why he probably shouldn’t let himself get provoked. It’s not a bad idea to have that reminder, since someone in the relationship probably ought to maintain a grip on the whole  _ stabbing people should really only be a last resort _ thing. That doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to have a conversation about it, though.

“I believe I fired you as my therapist some years ago,” Will grumbles semi-seriously. “You’re no longer in charge of my pathologies.”

“And finally,  _ caro _ , I enjoy showing you off. I’m afraid the dogs don’t make a very appreciative audience for it.”

Will tries and mostly succeeds in not choking on his drink when that surprises a laugh from him. “Oh, god, of course you do. You don’t care about the FBI or my damn post-traumatic nesting instinct, you just want to parade me around in a suit.”  

“It’s not a zero-sum game, Will. If my aesthetic preferences and your mental health and our combined safety can all be satisfied with an evening in town, it seems like an easy enough decision.”

He’s not wrong. Will’s pretty sure he’ll give in. But there’s no good reason to make it easy, so he gets even more comfortable in his chair and does his best to sound bored with the whole idea. “I could just wear one of my nice suits for dinner at home. Hell, ask me really nicely and you might get me into a tux. Are you sure you don’t want me all dressed up right here in your precious kitchen?”

“Will. The  _ dog hair." _ Hannibal looks so pained that Will has to bite his lip to keep from laughing again. Poor Hannibal’s come such a long way in tolerating and even enjoying the dogs, but Will’s still fairly certain that they’d each spend all their days in a dog version of Hannibal’s plastic suit if Will would allow it.

“Sophie only rubs up on you because you’re her favorite. She’d stop ruining your clothes if you spoiled her less,” he retorts, but then relents a bit. “Tell me what you had in mind. Please tell me it’s not the opera. I think I might need to work back up to that.” He’s not sure if he means the sheer length of an opera, or the fancy dress, or if he’s not quite ready to hear Italian again with all of the associations it now has. He hopes Hannibal won’t ask, and is grateful when he doesn’t.

“There’s a symphony performance I’d hoped we might attend tomorrow night, but I would be equally happy with taking you out to dinner.”

The symphony will require less social interaction, and make Hannibal happier. He’ll only understand about half of what Hannibal goes on about afterwards, but he likes listening to the man’s extended diatribes on the faults of the string section, even when he doesn’t actually understand them. It’s an easy enough choice, once he’s conceded the whole “acknowledging the existence of the outside world” thing to begin with. 

“I think I can survive the symphony. And I’ll dress up just for you. But you have to promise not to leave me alone to make conversation with strangers. And if you spend the entire intermission ranting about the lead violinist or whatever offends you most this time, I reserve the right to leave early.”

“I’ll endeavor not to rant, since the best piece is in the second half. I think I can manage it, in exchange for the pleasure of your company.”

“For the pleasure of listening to me know fuck-all about classical music,” Will corrects him with a grimace. It’s not entirely true; Will knew some before meeting Hannibal, the basics everyone knows, and he’s picked up more over the years. As a defensive mechanism, if nothing else. But he’s never going to have -- or want -- Hannibal’s extensive knowledge on the subject. He’s not even going to ask what they’re hearing; he won’t know it, whatever it is, probably.

They sit in comfortable silence for a while longer, enjoying the darkening evening, before Hannibal offers a quiet, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Thank you for caring enough to drag me out into the world. But I’m going to deny I said that tomorrow when I’m busy hating everything about it.”

“That goes without saying. I’ll try not to point out that you’re charming when you’re being difficult.”  

Will tips his head back to watch as Hannibal gets up and gathers their empty glasses to head inside and check on whatever he has simmering away in the kitchen, smelling unfairly delicious. He probably will hate going to the damn symphony. But he likes that Hannibal wants to take him. And he’s probably right about it being past time to rejoin the world. 

He still likes the boat idea, though. He stays out on the balcony a while longer, watching shadows lengthen, imagining an uncomplicated life out on the waves.


	21. Chapter 21

_ Three Years and Three Months: Rouen  _

Will moves as quietly as he can in the late-night, early-morning silence of their house.  But between the excited scrabbling and jingling of Sophie and Cavall excited to have him awake, and the inevitable small sounds of dishes clinking and water running, he’s not surprised to hear the loose step creak after a while.

He keeps thinking he ought to fix it, but there’s something to be said for the early warning system it provides at least occasionally, when Hannibal forgets it’s there or isn’t making an effort to be stealthy.  Or, he supposes, if someone ever tries to break in during the night.

Pity the burglar, really.  

It’s a four-way toss-up who’d take them down first.  Three-way, maybe; Cavall would just try to ineffectually lick a burglar to death.  Will would once have given Hannibal the edge over himself and Sophie, but he’s not so sure anymore.

He looks to make sure he can leave the current pancake unattended in its skillet for a minute, and then turns around to offer Hannibal an apologetic greeting.  “I’ll be done making noise in ten minutes if you want to go back to bed, or there’s coffee.”

“Coffee and whatever you’re making, and maybe sunrise. Then I’m going back to bed and dragging you with me.”

Hannibal somehow manages to look mostly put-together even like this, barefooted and in pajamas and with just a touch of bedhead.  Will still doesn’t know how he does it; he feels like a disaster himself, still a bit clammy with the residue of his nightmare.  He’d accuse Hannibal of primping before coming downstairs, except he’s seen the man like this thousands of times now, rolling out of bed effortlessly gorgeous.  It’s unfair, really.

He checks back on the pancake and flips it before pouring Hannibal a cup of coffee and bringing it over to the table where Hannibal’s now sitting, rubbing idly at Sophie’s ear.  “Sorry for the early wake-up. I did try to be quiet.”

It’s mostly a pointless apology.  It’s not the first early morning and it won’t be the last.  Will’s nightmares are mostly a thing of the past but they do pop up once in a while and there’ve been a string of them since Italy.  He’s found that making breakfast is more soothing than lying awake and perfectly still trying not to wake Hannibal, so now he does this instead.  

He yawns and heads back to the stove to monitor the pancake.  “If you’re okay with blueberries, you can have this batch.  Otherwise I can make you some plain. There’s plenty of batter.”  Of course there is; Hannibal almost always turns up,  so Will always makes enough for two. He still isn’t sure if it’s actually the kitchen sounds that wake him up, or if he’s awake the moment Will is, but pretends to stay asleep to give him a few minutes to pull himself back together. 

“Blueberries are fine. Which one was it this time?”

Will busies himself for a minute, turning the pancake out onto the plate and getting another one going, before he answers.  “The one where I don’t get there in time.”  Sometimes it’s Jack who gets there first in the dream, and sometimes it’s the Verger-Blooms and their hired hands.  That part varies. The part where he gets there too late, and watches them take Hannibal away, and somehow won’t or can’t move to stop it, doesn’t.

“Jack?”

“Alana.  I think Margot was there too, somewhere.”

“Hm.”  Hannibal takes a long swallow of coffee and Will’s warmed by the sight of his hands on the mug, his throat working to swallow.  Just Hannibal, in their kitchen, alive and with him and no one else in sight.  “I prefer that option, I think.  It would be more fitting.  And more entertaining, to see if they’d be able to bring themselves to turn me in for a trial. Alana would, I think.  I’m less certain about Margot. She might prefer a knife between the ribs. Messy but fast.”

“I prefer an option where I sleep through the night and no one comes for us at all, thanks very much.”

There’s also something to be said for the one where he rips apart anyone who tries, until he’s slippery and sticky with blood and Hannibal’s safe and so proud of him.  But he hasn’t told Hannibal about that version yet.  He’s only had that one twice.

“Perhaps I wore you out insufficiently last night to ensure your sleep.  I’ll endeavor to do better after breakfast.”

“Nice distraction attempt.”  Will’s amused enough to summon a smile and feel a little better despite himself.  “I’ll consider it.  Eat your breakfast while it’s hot.”  He delivers the first plate of pancakes to Hannibal and goes back to the stove to make a second batch for himself.  “For some reason one of their goons had a piece of cheese on his head this time.  Do you want to try to psychoanalyze that, or shall we just chalk it up to me being hungry?”

Hannibal peers at him suspiciously, as if he can’t tell whether Will’s joking.  He’s actually not; the cheese guy had been pretty weird.  He thinks it was cheddar and wonders if that makes a difference. Eventually Hannibal offers a small shrug and says only, “I’m unaware of any literature on the significance of cheese as headwear in dreams.  Let’s assume it was the subconscious equivalent of a stomach growl unless it recurs.  These are delicious, by the way.”

“They’re  _ pancakes _ , Hannibal.  It’s not exactly Cordon Bleu material.”

“Simple things made well are as much of an art form as more elaborate cooking.”

Will slides another pancake onto his own stack and says, “I’d have liked to see you serve pancakes at one of your fancy dinners in Baltimore.  All those servers circulating with tiny silver goblets of Aunt Jemima for the guests.”

“You wound me.  I would never have served anything but real maple syrup.  And they wouldn’t have appreciated well-executed simplicity anyway.”

“You poor thing.  Doomed to a life of ostentation you weren’t enjoying  _ at all, _ as protective coloration.  It must have been terrible for you. All those suits when you really longed for a life in sweatpants.”

Hannibal ignores that completely in favor of digging into his breakfast, giving Will the time to finish up loading his own plate and join Hannibal at the table.

“I taught myself to make them when I was working a lot of overnight shifts in homicide.”   He’s pretty sure he’s told this story before, but it’s part of the ritual that brings him back into his head.  Breakfast, inconsequential chatter, Hannibal’s quietly reassuring company, and eventually he’ll uncoil enough to go back to sleep.  “I’d get home starving and keyed up and make breakfast to put a little space between work and sleep.  Many burnt pancakes were sacrificed before I learned to do it right. The omelettes were even worse until I got the hang of them.”

“Necessary sacrifices to a worthy goal.”

Will takes a few more bites of his own breakfast while he thinks back to that shitty apartment and the beagle he’d had at the time who’d so happily eaten all of his failed breakfast efforts.  He thinks about necessary sacrifices.  Eventually he says, “I wouldn’t let them have you, you know.  If they came. I’d figure something out, even if it were Alana.”

Hannibal follows the topic change smoothly and doesn’t blink, just says calmly, “I know you would.  We’re not responsible for what we do or fail to do in our dreams, Will.  Or even our fantasies.”

“Our actions?”

“Arguably those.  Then again, I believe I’m legally insane and thus not responsible for those either.” Hannibal sounds, as ever, far too amused by his own insanity plea.  Will would have loved to be a fly on the wall during those conversations between Hannibal and his defense team.

Will thinks  _ it must be nice to be officially relieved of all responsibility for any terrible thing you might want to do _ , but he doesn’t say it.  He knows it would come out sounding more bitter than he means it. He just works his way through more of his breakfast.

Eventually they’re down to the scrapes of forks on nearly-empty plates, and Will averts his eyes while Hannibal slips the last bite of his pancake to Sophie under the table.  The sky’s lightening steadily, and he’s feeling calmer and sleepier now.  He could actually probably go straight back to sleep, but Hannibal did say something about a sunrise.

He splits the last splash of coffee between their mugs and says, “You’re on dishwashing duty.  Move fast and you might get to see that sunrise.”  He leaves Hannibal humming something cheerfully as he moves around the kitchen avoiding the dogs underfoot like some sort of choreographed ballet, and goes into the living room to watch for the sunrise out the window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Yes, that is a Cheese Man reference for the Buffy fans. You have no idea how much I wish I could have justified making it a Cheese Wendigo.)


	22. Chapter 22

_ Three Years, Five Months: Rouen _

Apparently early fall is the rainy season in Rouen.  It’s also the season when the roof on their well-maintained-but-elderly home decides it’s had enough of life, and springs a leak.

They don’t catch it right away. They’ve been out overnight, on a trip to a little winery and B&B that Hannibal’s been trying to drag Will to for weeks as part of his ongoing “get Will to leave the house occasionally in an effort to prove there aren’t actually potential spies lurking around every corner” project.

The trip was a pleasant one, and they linger the next morning and then make their way home laden down with a semi-obscene quantity of wine, stopping to collect the dogs from their overnight boarding en route.  So there’s a fair amount of damage done to the spare room by the time they get home in mid-afternoon.

Will’s annoyed at the scope of the damage. Hannibal’s delighted for the chance to redecorate; the dogs haven’t been particularly kind to the flooring in there, and anyway apparently he’s always thought a lighter wood would suit the wallpaper better. 

Will tries to keep his eyes from rolling right out of his head and they negotiate a compromise. They’ve gotten better at it over the years. 

Hannibal gets to redecorate. Will gets to redo the inside damage - the flooring, a chunk of the ceiling - himself rather than having a work crew tromping all over their space annoying him by doing things he knows how to do perfectly well. 

Will agrees he won’t tackle the roof himself, he’ll let Hannibal hire that part out. Apparently Hannibal doesn’t fancy the idea of Will risking life and limb on the rooftop. (Will’s fairly sure that Hannibal actually just fancies him working indoors where Hannibal can ogle him, but he doesn’t have any real objection to whatever debauched handyman fantasies Hannibal nurtures. And anyway roofing is a bit out of his comfort zone. But there’s no harm in letting Hannibal think he’s won that one.)  

In return, until the dogs can get back into their room, they get to sleep with Will and Hannibal. Not on the bed. But they get nice big beds of their own in the room. Hannibal gets to pick the colors of the beds, Will vetoes monogramming them, and then the two of them finally seem to have run out of things to negotiate about.

Will occasionally wonders if other couples, normal couples, spend this much time in exhaustive negotiations. But it’s just idle curiosity; the question doesn’t trouble him much. It’s been a long time now since he last longed for normal.

The ceiling turns out to be easy enough to fix; it’s only a small spot that’s really damaged, and not much trouble to cut out and patch the drywall.  The floor is a larger project, and gets delayed by how long it takes Hannibal to decide on the right flooring (and to special-order it, of course it has to be special-ordered), but eventually Will gets to work.

It takes him a couple of days to get the work done.  He pretends not to notice Hannibal inventing excuses to wander by the open door to check up on Will as he curses and grumbles his way through it. Will does take pity on his husband enough to work shirtless to give the man a cheap thrill, though. He’s not completely heartless.

The roof work starts a couple of weeks later, with some temporary patching having been done in the meanwhile.  Will wakes painfully early one morning to sounds of hammering and thumping and feet stomping around.  It sounds like they’re almost right above him.

He rolls over with a groan and buries his face against Hannibal’s back, pressing against the long-healed brand there. “Fucking hell,” he mumbles. “As much as you must have paid them to bump us up their client queue, you couldn’t have slipped them a little more to start at a decent hour?”

“That would just have been self-indulgent,  _ caro _ .”  Hannibal sounds more awake than Will feels, and he reaches back to draw Will’s arm up and over his side so they fit closer together. “Once upon a time, I attempted to practice self-restraint on occasion. You’ve been an unfortunate influence on me in that regard.”

“Mm.” It’s not really an agreement or a disagreement, just a sleepy little sigh Will makes. “You love it.”

“It was an observation, not a complaint.”  

The sound of their voices draws a little yip from one of the dogs sprawled in the big comfortable beds on the floor, but they seem to have a little time before Cavall and Sophie actually force them to get up, so Will enjoys being warm and comfortable where he is. Or he tries to enjoy it. There’s another loud  _ thud _ from up above and some alarmingly anatomically specific cursing. 

Will presses his forehead harder against Hannibal’s back and grumbles: “Rude. Very rude.”

“Undeniably.”  Hannibal moves and stretches now, rolls over to come face to face with Will, mussed hair and morning breath and all. He looks like every improbable and unwise thing Will ever needed with the face of a particularly ruthless angel. It’s breathtaking.

Will studies that face and thinks about what he wants to ask. He  _ can  _ ask. Because it’s safe, because he knows nothing will come of it. They’re safe at home in their bed. They aren’t going to do anything to anyone here in France, unless they want to find themselves fleeing the country in short order. So he can  _ think  _ about it without tipping into a dangerous place that could turn real. So he can ask: “If you were going to do something about that, what would it be?”

He can tell that Hannibal understands the rules of this particular game from the way he smiles affectionately, not excited or bloodthirsty, just pleased to be asked to imagine. “Nothing right now. We need them alive to fix the roof, for one thing. I’d do it in a few weeks, or better yet I’d wait several months. When the direct connection is less obvious.”

Will considers that thinking back to Baltimore. “All those people walking around in the world. You’d marked them down for future debt collection and they didn’t even know it yet. You had...what, a spreadsheet?  One of those color-coded notebooks in your office?”

“A Rolodex.”

He manages not to actually laugh at the mental image of Hannibal, sweetly old-fashioned thing that he is in some ways, carefully maintaining a Rolodex.  But he’s pretty sure he doesn’t wholly hide the crinkle at the corners of his eyes that give his amusement away.  “Oh, god. Of course you did. That’s weirdly adorable. What is wrong with me that I find that adorable?”

“You’ve been spending too much time with me.” Hannibal doesn’t look or sound the slightest bit contrite. 

There’s another noise from above, an exchange of voices, something about the shingles that need to be replaced, a  _ clank _ .  Will groans again. “I wanted to sleep in today.”

“You could go downstairs and nap on the sofa. It’ll be quieter down there. I’ll make some breakfast and feed the wretched dogs.”

“Or. Better idea.”  Will doesn’t bother to hide the smile this time.  “If we can hear them, can they hear us?”

“Hm.” Hannibal’s nearly bridged the space between them, and Will’s never cared less about morning breath than when kissing Hannibal, so he leans in and does, and lets that go on for a while before he finally breaks free to let Hannibal finish his sentence. “I think you’d have to be  _ very  _ loud for them to hear you.”

“Or you would.”

“I’ll take it under consideration.”

The next half hour or so becomes a bit of a battle to see who can wring the loudest noises from the other. It’s messy and fun and there isn’t really a clear winner, but Will doesn’t particularly care.  It seems to be one of those games where the actual winning or losing is pretty much beside the point. At some point the dogs leave the room, having gotten the message that breakfast isn’t forthcoming anytime soon, so perhaps they’re the real losers in the whole thing.  The dogs or the poor contractors.

Will never does find out whether the contractors heard them.  But from the way they refuse to meet his eyes when he leaves the house several hours later to run errands, and the fact that for the rest of their time on the project they arrive later and work more quietly, he rather suspects they did. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late update, loves, stuff happened and I couldn't get this polished up for the usual Wednesday posting schedule. Darn life, getting in the way of fic.


	23. Chapter 23

_ Three Years, Seven Months: Rouen _

Will doesn’t even pretend to be repentant when Hannibal complains about the final bowl of gooey pumpkin innards Will’s just brought him from out on the balcony.

He sets the bowl down on the counter firmly and offers his husband a barely-consoling pat on the shoulder. “You don’t have to keep roasting them. I really don’t care if you just throw them away. The seeds are not the point of this endeavor.”

“So you claim every year, and yet the seeds are the only worthwhile thing to come out of all this fuss of yours,” Hannibal says with a sigh, and reaches for the bowl to rinse the seeds and spread them out to dry before roasting. “You know no one’s coming to the door tonight. Even if the French used Halloween as an excuse to eat cheap drugstore candy  _ en masse _ , no one would come here. We’re too far away from the neighbors too be worth the trip.”

“No one ever came trick or treating in Wolf Trap, either. It’s one of the joys of living in the middle of nowhere. I still made jack-o-lanterns every year. And usually threw away the seeds uneaten. So there.” 

Will ignores any further grumblings and heads back out to the balcony to carve his third and final pumpkin. The other two are already set up with candles, flickering a bit in the breeze and the rapidly-falling darkness, casting shadows and light over him while he works. He was telling the truth; he always did this, alone in Wolf Trap, snug on his porch with his dogs and his candles. There’s a ritual to it that he likes even when it’s just for him. A marking of the season. A reason to spend an evening outdoors listening to the wind in the trees, watching the flames dance.

Last year they’d just been moving into the Rouen house and he hadn’t bothered to observe the holiday in his usual way, but this year Halloween is on his mind.

Monsters are on his mind.

By the time he finishes his carving, lights the candle and sets the lantern with the others, it’s almost full dark. He climbs up from his spread-out newspaper pumpkin-carving station with a bit of a groan when his knees protest, and takes a more comfortable seat in one of the chairs. He could go in search of a drink but he’s fairly sure that if he waits a few minutes, one will come to him.

And it does. Certain things are predictable, after all this time. Eventually the sliding door opens and he hears Hannibal’s footsteps and the gentle clink of a glass being put down on the little table next to him. When the door shuts again with a squeak he winces. “Thank you. And remind me to look at that door one of these days. That sound is awful.”

Hannibal takes the other chair with a glass of his own and nods toward the pumpkins. “They’re nice. And the seeds are all rinsed.”

He snickers a bit, looking over at his not-particularly-artistic, vaguely-lopsided lanterns. He’s not harboring any delusions about their artistic merit. “They’re nice in a fourth-grade-macaroni-art sort of way. I like the process and the smell and the candelight, but I never claimed to be an artist. One of these years I’ll make you carve them with me. I bet yours will be masterpieces.” He knocks back a good-size swallow of the whiskey Hannibal’s brought him before adding, “I do enjoy seeing you apply your knife skills to new canvases.”

It’s a deliberate provocation and he’s sure Hannibal knows it is, by the sharp and curious look sent in his direction. “What’s on your mind, Will?”

Will watches the lights bob and weave for a few quiet moments and doesn’t let himself have another swallow of whiskey, just because he wants one so badly. He eventually says, “Things that go bump in the night, I suppose. Monsters. Masks and the faces underneath them. Do you realize we’ve been together now longer than we were apart?”

It sounds like a non sequitur, probably, but it’s not. Will thought Hannibal would follow the train of thought but for once maybe he didn’t, because there’s a note in his voice - worry? fear? - when he answers. “I’m acutely aware. Are you getting bored with our life here already? We could find somewhere new if you need a change.”

He reaches out a hand impulsively to graze the back of Hannibal’s, a small soothing gesture. He hadn’t meant to worry him. “I’m not bored. I never could be. Just thinking. You’ve been on a leash for a long time now.”

Reassured, Hannibal settles back in his chair a bit but traps Will’s fingers in his own before he admits, “I did almost slip it once or twice. I still might, one day.”

“When?” Will has his suspicions - there was a certain flirtatious shopkeeper in Argentina he was always half-surprised Hannibal hadn’t taken out, and that’s just the first one who comes to mind. 

“A waiter in Paris. That terrible bartender in Rosario. Here and there; it doesn’t matter.”

“Hm. I suppose not. The point was, you’ve been a very well behaved sort of monster.”

Hannibal looks at him in the particular soft way he does when he’s thinking about Naples and says, “With a notable exception.”

“A notable exception that my hands were responsible for, not yours.” He flexes his fingers mostly unconsciously, remembering.

“I’m fairly certain if we’re ever prosecuted for that, I won’t be forgiven because I encouraged you rather than holding the blade myself,  _ caro _ . There were no innocent bystanders in that room.”

“You’re dragging me away from the point. Which is you. And monsters. And letting you off the leash.”

It’s always been the case that Hannibal’s stillness is more telling than his motion, and that’s true now. He goes so, so still in the flickering half-light. It’s a long minute before he asks, “Is that on the table?” Still and calm as anything, but he sounds half-strangled. It’s the first clue he’s given Will to how badly he must miss it.

“I’m putting it on the table for discussion. Not action. We’d need some kind of rules.” There’s a sudden tension in the air that’s practically palpable, so he does his best to cut it with a dumb half-joke. “The killer equivalent of a safeword, or something.” Except it’s not really a joke at all. That is, more or less, what he’s suggesting. A negotiation. Care and planning, rather than impulse. Limits and boundaries and trust. Taking control of what's begun to feel inevitable, instead of waiting for it to happen unexpectedly and dangerously.

Hannibal’s nails are suddenly digging into Will’s hand, hard enough to hurt, but Will’s pretty sure it’s unintentional and he doesn’t complain. 

“I don’t know if I could stop again,” he says so quietly Will has to strain to hear it. “I’m not sure I would have stopped in Naples if I hadn’t you to take care of. I might have just kept killing people until they came for me. You should be very careful what you turn loose.”

“You’d have me.” Will’s not quite sure what sort of rules he’s thinking of, but he has some ideas, and this is one of them. “I wouldn’t let you go without me, not after what happened before. I’d want to be there to keep you safe. And to  _ see _ you.” He’s pretty sure Hannibal can’t actually form any more words right now so he just keeps talking, steady and soothing, more or less the way he’d talk to a stray, the sounds more important than the sense. “I never really have, have I? Dolarhyde was something different, for the two of us. Not what you do when you plan. I’ve imagined what that must be like but I’ve never seen it, only the aftermath. You could show me.”

“ _ Will _ .” It seems to be the only word Hannibal, who can talk anyone into the ground, has at the moment.

Will didn’t really expect this to go any other way. He leaves his drink and unwinds his fingers from Hannibal’s just long enough to get up and move over to his chair, to climb somewhat awkwardly into his lap. He ignores the chair arm digging into his back and just rests against Hannibal’s chest, warm and, he hopes, reassuring.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Now you think about it. When you’re ready, we’ll talk about rules. Just sit with me for now, okay? It’s going to be fine. Whatever we do or don’t do, it’s going to be fine, Hannibal.  We’ll take care of each other.”

Hannibal’s arms come up around him - of course they do, that’s so practiced by now Hannibal barely needs any control over his motor functions at all for it - and Will nestles in, and they sit quietly together for a long time until the candles burn out and they’re left in the dark.


	24. Chapter 24

_Three Years, Eight-Nine Months: Rouen_

To the extent Will had expected anything specific at all, he’d imagined it would be A Conversation, once Hannibal’s head stopped spinning. One of those things Hannibal would want to talk about with great seriousness and formality and probably some pretentious metaphors. He’d thought it would take a long time, and probably some tension over the specific terms, but that it would essentially be an overly-long, overly-immoral therapy session.

But apparently after almost-four years, longer if you count all those months of phone conversations, he still doesn’t have any damn clue. It’s comforting in an odd way. Nice to think that if by some chance they get to grow old and cranky together, there will probably still be surprises.

What happens instead is a series of moments spread over weeks, surprising and oddly comfortable in how they integrate into their lives instead of being some separate one-time negotiation.

***********

There’s a late night a few days after that first conversation on the balcony, when Will’s half-asleep and the room so dark they can barely see each other, when Hannibal asks, “You’d come with me?”

It’s unrelated to anything they were talking about as they dozed, but there’s no question what he means. Will’s too far gone to fully wake up but he manages to move enough to press a little closer and say, “Yes. If they take you, they take me too.”

“Even Steven?”

Will hides a smile in Hannibal’s chest even though it’s too dark to see it. He’d thought so carefully about what to say on that long-ago night when he’d brought Randall to Hannibal. Everything had been so meticulous and difficult, with none of this languid drifting fondness. “Exactly. We’re pack hunters now, so learn to love it.”

There’s quiet then, and Will’s almost entirely asleep when he hears Hannibal answer, “You know I already do.” He summons up enough energy for a wordless squeeze of Hannibal’s hand, and then he sleeps deep and dreamless.

***********

After that, it’s another week or so until they find themselves at a restaurant that turns out to have terrible service. Slow, curt service. The kind that would have gotten someone a prime spot in Hannibal’s Rolodex, once upon a time. Will watches Hannibal seethe through the first two courses and then rests a hand over his husband’s twitchy fingers and leans in close to murmur, “You’re going to have to let this one go. Not at home; that’s going to be another rule.”

He feel’s Hannibal’s hand tense and then relax all at once under his own. Hannibal still clearly has murder on his mind as he stabs far too vigorously at the food on his plate, but he asks calmly enough, “Where did you have in mind?”

Will hasn’t actually thought that far; _away_ is as far as he’s gotten. He considers that for a moment and then says, “We travel enough. It’s not odd for us to keep doing it if we don’t go too often. But not the same place twice. And not under these names.”

He thinks for a minute Hannibal’s going to acquiesce completely when he concedes, “There are many places I would like you to see. I suspect most of them contain people who would not be missed.” But he should have known better, because there’s a glint in Hannibal’s eye when he adds, “I get to choose the names.”

Will can already imagine the terrible names Hannibal’s going to saddle him with. Dreadful things out of operas, no doubt. But for names they’re going to use and then discard, he supposed he can live with terrible aliases if they make Hannibal happy. He allows it with a sighed, “Fine. As long as I never have to be Jack.”

***********

It’s a rainy morning in a series of rainy days, grey and cold. Days when even the French countryside becomes less romantic and more...muddy. They’re all stir crazy, and eventually Will decides to take the dogs out for a very wet and squishy walk, before they can do any more damage indoors. He’s a little worried Hannibal may have started visually measuring them for a roasting pan after they knocked over one too many vases.

The stay out as long as he can bear it. Sophie and Cavall romp and Will tries not to think about the hosing-down they’re going to require as he hides under a tree for some scant protection. He thinks idly about warmer, sunnier places they could be. Back to Argentina for a visit, maybe. Hannibal would arrange tickets in a heartbeat if asked.

His thoughts drift idly further to a cruise, which he’s always thought sounded a little like a circle of hell - trapped on a boat with nothing to do but be sociable. But Hannibal would be right in his element, charming people right and left. Dropping bodies overboard in the night while Will stands guard and creates distractions if needed. An idle, unwise, impractical little fantasy. He makes a mental note to tell Hannibal about it sometime, and whistles the dogs back to his side. They squelch back home together.

Later, warm and dry, Will spins Hannibal a mental picture. They both agree that it’s a terrible idea, but it’s something to while away a rainy afternoon with.

***********

“You have the worst hobbies,” Will complains. He’s trying to concentrate on measuring a 2x4 for one of the endless jobs of fixing up their elderly home, and Hannibal’s just wandered in to read him selections from the latest doctoral thesis about the Chesapeake Ripper. He has some sort of internet search alert set up for their names and reads the psychiatric literature far too gleefully.

This one apparently thinks she’s found signs of latent homosexuality in the Ripper’s tableaux. Something about the inherent symbolism of penetrating knife wounds.

Will shrugs and determinedly keeps measuring rather than get too dragged into this. He does play along enough to ask, “Is she unaware that heterosexuals stab people on a daily basis? Rumor has it they also perform penetrative sexual activities on occasion.”

“She’s worked backward from an incorrect conclusion to utterly faulty premises. It’s sloppy work. I should write her committee a letter.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” That’s the very last thing they need. “Please. Freddie hasn’t run a Murder Husband Sightings piece in months and I’d like to keep it that way. Let the poor girl have her PhD in peace. It’s no worse than anything Frederick’s ever written about us.”

Hannibal looks mournfully down at the tablet he’s reading from and asks, “I don’t suppose, should our discussions ever come to fruition, you’re going to let me display them? I’d enjoy giving the academic gristmill something new to work with.”

Will puts down the pencil and tape and looks up, finally. “We’re not leaving calling cards. That’s off the table for good. Too risky.”

He supposes Hannibal hadn’t really expected anything else; his expression isn’t so much disappointment as resignation. Still, he notes, “Just think of the academic debates we could stir up if we tried, Will.”

“You’re impossible, and I’m starting to think it was less your genius and more sheer dumb luck that you didn’t get caught before you ever met me.” Will’s only about half-kidding. “Nope. No tableaux. The psychiatric world will have to get by on rehashing your old ones.”

He lets Hannibal leave the room before he lets the tiniest sigh slip out. Part of him really would like to see what Hannibal would do. What horrible, wonderful monstrosities he would create for Will. Will knows he can’t ever let that particular rein slip even the tiniest bit loose, but he can imagine. And does, for about thirty seconds, before he shakes his head to clear it and returns to his work.

Certain ideas are really too dangerous to indulge at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For folks who don't follow me on Tumblr and thus weren't already aware of my apologies: Sorry for the delay on this one! I have a dedicated Writing Night each week and for the last couple of weeks some real-life stuff has prevented Writing Night from happening, so it's been hard to keep on schedule. Writing Night should be back in full effect as of this upcoming week. So have a very late Wednesday chapter, and then the Saturday chapter will probably happen on Sunday, and then we are hopefully back on schedule barring a recurrence of Death Plague 2016.


	25. Chapter 25

_ Three Years, Ten Months: Rouen _

It takes Hannibal’s hand on his shoulder to bring Will out of his head, where he’d been in too deep to hear footsteps or, apparently, his name spoken. He opens his eyes and is dizzy for a moment at the too-fast transition between the world in his head and the one outside, but he smiles and tips his head to rub his cheek against Hannibal’s fingers. "Hey. Sorry, were you talking to me?”

“ _ At _ you, apparently." Hannibal’s not offended; this happens less these days, but still often enough. They both have their mental retreats and the occasional need for them, still. Will assumes they always will, as two solitary creatures whose choice to share a life doesn’t entirely negate their natures. "I’m going out in a little while to pick up a few things before the storm kicks up again, I was wondering if you need me to bring anything back."

Will considers for a minute and then remembers, “I think I ate the last of your cheese last night. You know, the one that looks like a brain."

“The  _ Langres _ . Which one traditionally eats with champagne for a special occasion, not standing in front of the refrigerator at three in the morning."

“I couldn’t sleep. I was hungry. So sue me." Will shrugs and smiles and offers, “Or bring back some champagne too and remind me how to eat the damn cheese properly. Hell, if we have any grapes left let’s call the whole mess dinner."

“I suppose you want to throw a blanket on the floor and make it an indoor picnic,” Hannibal chides mildly, coming around the front of the sofa to sit next to Will. 

“It’s not a terrible idea. Shut the dogs away. Pretend there’s not a foot of snow out there." Will thinks about it for a second and then shakes his head. "Okay, scratch the floor picnic. But fancy cheese dinner and pretense that it might be spring again one day, I could get behind."

“The snow will melt, Will. It always does."

Hannibal reaches out to pull Will snug against him and Will goes, back against Hannibal’s side and head tipped back on Hannibal’s shoulder, but not without making a face first. "See, you  _ sound  _ all deep and philosophical, but you literally just said ‘Time happens.’ You just make it sound better with the accent."

He feels a chuckle shake Hannibal’s body, and then his husband asks, “Were you somewhere warm, then?  When I interrupted?”

“When you  _ rudely _ interrupted,” Will scolds, but without any heat behind it. "I was sailing on the Nola. Somewhere it was warm and sunny." Abigail had been there, too, but Will doesn’t mention that. They  _ can _ talk about Abigail now, the wounds are healed enough for that, but it’s still easier not to unless circumstances absolutely require it. "I think I had a vague notion I might drop anchor and fish at some point, but mostly I just wanted warmth and speed. Wind in my hair, the whole cliche. If I have to lift one more shovel full of snow my arms are going to fall off."

“We  _ could _ hire someone. They have services."

“More people on our payroll getting to know our faces is not what we need." Also, Will just likes doing it. Usually. Handling the snow is one of the small ways he takes care of their home, makes it nice for himself and for Hannibal. But it’s getting to the point in the season where the pleasure of taking care of their home does start to give way to frozen toes and aching muscles. He sighs and leans harder against Hannibal. "It’s fine. Like you said. Time happens. Bring home the champagne and get me drunk at dinner and I’ll forget I complained at all."

Which is precisely what Hannibal does, going off to run his errands while Will slips back into the warmth and sun of his imagination. At some point he slips into a true sleep and only wakes up from his nap much later, when Cavall’s jingling and prancing lets him know that Hannibal’s home. 

Dinner is almost, if not quite, what Will had ordered. Hannibal being Hannibal, the cheese and grapes had become three cheeses, two types of salami that Will can’t distinguish between but that Hannibal swears are entirely different, grapes and apples and pomegranates, and some odd little crackers. And the champagne, of course. 

Will still thinks pouring champagne over cheese is a fairly silly way to eat it, but Hannibal insists it’s the traditional way to eat Langres. And Will’s half a bottle of bubbly in and without any desire to argue about it. Although he can and does cheerfully quarrel about several other things, beginning with his firm conviction that the two salamis are the same and Hannibal’s butcher is just messing with him, and carrying right on from there. 

All things considered, for a quiet night at home in a snowstorm, it’s a lively evening. 

Which is probably why it eventually leads to the one conversation they haven’t had yet, the most important one. Maybe Will was always going to have to be just a little bit drunk for this part, the _who_ question. It’s after dinner by then, the controversial cheese back in the refrigerator waiting for Will’s next late-night raid.  Will’s back to staring out the window as even more snow falls, piling on top of what’s already there. The landscape’s all but gone under an even white blanket. He feels safe and trapped, all at once.

He feels more than hears Hannibal come up behind him, a warm and solid presence at his back. Will leans back and trusts Hannibal to hold him up and says, “Okay. I’m ready to try travelling again. Take me somewhere."

“Somewhere warm? A visit to Argentina again, maybe? I wouldn’t object to revisiting some of our favorite places there."

“Hmm." Will’s noncommittal. "Before me, when you weren’t being the Ripper. You traveled sometimes to hunt undetected, didn’t you?”

Hannibal’s breath catches almost undetectably at the seeming change in topic and he nips gently at Will’s shoulder before answering. "On occasion. I believe a few of them did end up as notches in my official records, once they cross-referenced dates of my dinner parties. Others never were found. Why do you ask?”

“I’m wondering how you picked them. I know about the locals, but what about the rest? Did you pick places to go and then hunt once you arrived? Or identify people and then travel to them?” 

“A little of both. Conferences provided a useful way to meet people from all over, and many of them shockingly rude. Or incompetent. It was a service to psychiatry to pay them visits in their home after some time had elapsed, really." Hannibal sounds almost fond of the memory. "Of course it was necessary to be careful with that.  I couldn’t risk setting up too much of a pattern someone could have cross-referenced with conference dates and attendee lists. But once in a while. Other times I just went somewhere new and waited for someone to catch my attention." 

“Window shopping?”  The idea’s funnier than it should be, with the remnants of the champagne wandering through his bloodstream, making him feel warm and light-headed.

“Something like that. Have we gotten off track, or is this part of your vacation planning?”

“I think it might be." Eyes firmly fixed on the darkness and the whirling snow, head just fizzy enough to loosen his tongue, Will considers. "We haven’t talked about  _ who _ it would be, and I’m wondering if the  _ who  _ drives the  _ where _ ."

“I assumed you had made up your mind on that topic already. Was I incorrect?”

Will hasn’t, not really. He’s been able to entertain a lot of this, but not quite so far as to think of some specific person that he and Hannibal might hunt, together. Someone he might watch Hannibal kill, as Hannibal had watched him in Italy. His dreams don’t yet have a face. He admits, “I don’t know. It can’t be like you used to do it. Not just because someone was...well, whatever the reasons used to be. Splashed mud on your shoes, or whatever."

“They were very expensive shoes,” Hannibal murmurs into Will’s ear and the terrible hilarious part of it is that Will genuinely isn’t sure if the man is joking or not. He’d buy it either way. "Are we to dole out some sort of vigilante justice to those you deem deserving, then?" He doesn’t sound perturbed by the notion of changing up his habits. 

“I really don’t know,” Will has to admit. "Maybe something along those lines. I think maybe… maybe you choose, but I get veto power? If it’s someone I can’t live with."

“Clever." Hannibal’s hands are on Will’s hips now, digging in just slightly. "You know I’ll pick someone particularly terrible just to please you."

“Or I might say no to whoever you pick, just to torment you. Even if you pick someone terrible. Even if you pick Freddie Lounds." Will turns to smile at Hannibal to soften the mild reproof when he adds, “Who you are  _ not  _ allowed to pick. Anyone previously off the table is still off the table." No one from their old lives. He  _ thinks  _ Hannibal knows that, but it’s the kind of thing one doesn’t really take chances with. He’ll play a lot of games with Hannibal but never anything that could have Molly as the stakes.

Hannibal’s quiet for a few long moments, considering, and then he kisses Will lightly on the cheek, where he can just reach from his current position behind Will. "I was going to broach the idea of going somewhere for our anniversary anyway. If we can wait until then, it would be a good excuse for travel. We’ll go window shopping."

“Not Italy." It’s perhaps foolish of Will, but he rather thinks he might stay out of Italy for good. The artwork isn’t worth the bloody way visits there seem to end up for him. 

“Not Italy,” Hannibal confirms."Tell your students we’ll take some time in April. They’ll have to do without you. I can’t."

Will flushes warm at that particular tone in Hannibal’s voice, which he probably should be immune to by now. But he’s really, really not. So he turns the rest of the way around and slides his arms up around Hannibal’s neck and promises, “You won’t have to. We’ll go together. Pick somewhere you like, somewhere we’ll have a good vacation whether or not anything else happens. We’ll have our anniversary. And you can window shop. And then we’ll see. Okay?”

“All right." Hannibal’s lips are warm and close and Will can just smell the champagne on his breath, although his own breath must be stronger. Will’s tempted to lean in further for a proper kiss and then drag Hannibal to bed, or back to the sofa, or wherever the nearest surface might be. But it feels like something important just happened here, and he wants to sit with that for a little while and see how it feels, before anything else. 

So he turns back to the glass, keeping Hannibal with him, and together they watch the snow come down for a while longer.


	26. Chapter 26

_Three Years, Eleven Months: Rouen_

Hannibal so rarely ventures into the messy, comfortable confines of Will’s study that Will’s briefly confused to see the little packet sitting on his desk. Then he’s just entertained - at the emotional trauma it must have caused Hannibal to venture into the realm of untamed dog hair and scattered floor cushions, at the unspoken message to take his own time contemplating whatever it is, at the realization that he hasn’t been in that room in a few days and for all he knows Hannibal has been waiting breathlessly for a response. It would explain his odd behavior the previous evening, the sideways glances and unconscious finger-tapping.

 _Ridiculous man_ , he thinks with a smile. Still getting himself caught in his own little games after all this time. It does keep life interesting. Maybe he’ll let Hannibal stew for another day or two, just for the fun of it. 

He opens the thick envelope carefully for just that reason, working the seal loose gently so he can close it back up again undetected should he decide to do so. He settles into the big armchair as he does, and lets the papers spill gently out into his lap

It is mostly papers, but also a pair of passports, authentically beaten-up looking. Will never inquires too closely about this part of it; he imagines whoever Hannibal keeps on call for this sort of thing whips up new identities, but he supposes it’s possible they’re recycling someone else’s real identities. Either way, the work looks good and he’s getting used to seeing his own face looking back at him with someone else’s name.

He skims an eye over the details for a moment and then reaches down absently to pat at Cavall, who’s come up looking for attention. “ _David_. No one strained themselves too hard coming up with this one, huh, buddy?” Cavall wriggles delightedly at the attention. Will feels the first stirring of a shiver up his spine: A throwaway identity, bland and unremarkable, and time to contemplate it uninterrupted. 

He knows now what’s in the rest of the paperwork, but knowing, chooses to slow down rather than speed up. He flips idly through the rest of David’s passport to see where he’s been. Bermuda; Morocco. “David” likes warm weather, apparently. He’s a couple of years younger than Will.

Gazing blandly out from David’s passport, Will looks guileless and straightforward. He looks like a man who has no idea what it feels like to take a life, and then another, and then another. He looks like someone Will might have been, once.

Will grazes his fingertips over the smooth flat image of his/David’s face and notices with a vague sense of satisfaction that his hand is perfectly steady. Then he sets David aside to see what else Hannibal has left for him.

Hotel reservations in Denmark. Not exactly the warm sunny retreat Will (or probably David) had in mind. No plane or train tickets; perhaps Hannibal’s planning to drive. Or waiting for Will’s nod or veto to make any nonrefundable arrangements. Because they do this together, now, or not at all. Pack hunters.

Okay, maybe there’s a small unsteadiness in Will’s hands at that thought. A brief, intense sense memory of moonlight and blood and salt air. Maybe he has to take a moment to close his eyes and rest his head back against the chair and just breathe. 

He skims over and past the opera tickets; of course Hannibal will want to take him to the Royal Opera, and of course he’ll go. He doesn’t even stop to see what the show will be. Whatever it is, chances are he won’t know it, and Hannibal will explain it, and Will may enjoy some of the performance but mostly he’ll enjoy Hannibal’s enjoyment. Or he’ll soothe his husband’s complaints if there should be an inadequate tenor, an unskilled violinist, or staging that fails to live up to Hannibal’s exacting standards. Either way his enjoyment will be sincere but will not derive from the on-stage histrionics. Oddly or amusingly enough, it’s been easier for time and love and his own nature to bend him to killing than to any sincere appreciation for the operatic arts.

Which leaves him with the rest of the stack. Printouts of newspaper articles, mostly. Will reads them carefully, and more than once.

There are a few pictures of Felix, the man who is the focus of the articles, but most of them are shots taken on the way to or from a courtroom, dressed up for hearings. He probably doesn’t look that way anymore. Definitely wouldn’t have dressed so nicely while carrying on with the alleged crimes. Maybe when abducting the children, to gain trust; certainly not when killing them.

A child-killer. Wiggled free from any legal form of justice on a procedural technicality but almost certainly guilty based on the articles. Although if Will were to proceed down this path, he’d want to do his own research, to see if Hannibal’s cherry-picked the information.

He’s certainly cherry-picked the prey. Hannibal almost couldn’t have picked something harder for Will to say no to unless he’d scribbled “Also, this man is mean to puppies” along the bottom of the page. 

It’s either an attempt to be kind to Will by handing him a verifiably terrible person gift-wrapped with a shiny ribbon, or an attempt to be difficult by giving Will something he can’t say no to. Maybe it’s both; Hannibal’s gifts come with sharp edges more rarely these days, but after all, it’s a special occasion. If he can please and annoy Will at once, he’s certain to do so. That’s the man Will’s chosen to throw his lot in with, he reflects with the usual mingled senses of fondness and exasperation.

He flips back through the stack and studies what he can see of Felix’s face. He doesn’t like what he sees, but then, it’s easier not to. He’s not sure he’d give the man a second glance if they passed on the street. Which doesn’t say anything much; most of the worst people Will’s ever met wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. Or would do so only in ways they chose to, as protective coloration, he thinks with a smirk, thinking of Hannibal’s eye-catching plaids and patterns in their Baltimore days. _Look at me and only see what I want you to see._

There’s no earthly reason this man should be Will’s or Hannibal’s problem. He needs to remember that; if they take him, Will can’t pretend to himself that he’s doing the world a favor or doing justice. They would be doing precisely what they want to do, for no reason but their own pleasure, and simply practicing a sort of harm reduction in the process. It would be more flattering to imagine himself an avenging angel, but Will doesn’t want to lie to himself. 

He wants to do this clear-eyed. But he does want to do it.

He stacks the papers and passports neatly back into their envelope and sets it aside for later, and then he sits for a while idly petting Cavall and thinking. He thinks about Denmark, and about what’s for dinner, and about those suits and the ridiculous ties, which he sometimes misses despite himself. Past, present, and one possible future mingling and blurring.

The dates aren’t for a few weeks, and anyway they could go to Denmark and just be tourists. have a nice vacation in a new city. Let Hannibal add to his mental list of countries where he’s done things to Will that would drive Freddie Lounds’ circulation numbers through the roof if she could get her hands on photographs, and come home again. There’s really only one decision that needs making today.

He clicks his tongue absently for Cavall to follow him as he leaves the room, leaving the papers behind for now, in search of Hannibal. They find him at the table, head bent over a sketch. His eyebrows are wrinkled in concentration as he fusses with a line that seems to displease him, and Will watches for a moment in amusement. He can’t quite recognize the building from the angle he’s at, but it looks like one of Hannibal’s endless architectural drawings. Which at least have the benefit of not including Will’s ass in any way.

Will wanders up behind Hannibal and rubs at the back of his neck and shoulders idly, more an affectionate gesture than any serious intent at a massage. “The Uffizi? Really?” He jabs a thumb in a little harder than strictly necessary once he recognizes the building. “I did get shot there, you know. It’s not my greatest memory.”

“It’s still an interesting building to draw. And you _were_ going to stab me,” Hannibal murmurs, still frowning at his drawing, but leaning back into Will’s hands. There’s no heat in the conversation; they’ve had it before and the scars are long healed.

Will doesn’t bother pointing out that he still doesn’t quite know whether he’d really have gone through with the bloodletting or not. It’s an old, old quarrel. “It wasn’t our best day,” is all he admits to before changing the conversation. “Anyway. If you have a minute, I came to discuss vacation plans.”

And _there’s_ Hannibal’s tension, appearing out of nowhere to settle in the shoulders that Will’s kneading. But all his voice betrays is a curiosity as he asks, “What did you think of my suggested itinerary?”

“Hmm.” Will presses a kiss to the top of Hannibal’s head, observing the silvering there increasing just a bit with the years. “I think we should rent a boat, unless it’s too early in the season there.”

“I’ll investigate the possibilities. Remind me never to try to take you anywhere without waterways; you have a one-track mind.”

“Okay. Then take me to Denmark. I’ll bring the stupid fancy suit and you can take me to the opera. And I’ll think about the rest. I want to do some research.”

Hannibal tilts his head up and sideways enough to search Will’s expression for hesitation beyond prudence, and doesn’t seem to find any. He smiles up at Will and says only, “I’d expect no less. Will you bring your laptop in here and do your research with me? While I’ve got my sketchpad out.”

Will tries not to roll his eyes and is only halfway successful. “You want to draw me staring at my laptop?”

“I want to draw the face you make when you’re concentrating. If you wish me to set aside the Uffizi, you’ll need to give me some new inspiration instead, _caro_.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Will mutters, but he goes and fetches his computer, and sets up at the table. He doesn’t actually intend to do his research into their new friend Felix with Hannibal staring at him the whole time, but he can find other ways to occupy himself for an hour or two if Hannibal needs to draw his millionth portrait of Will. 

He gets comfortable and tunes out the scratching of charcoal on paper, letting it fade into the background as he starts researching the fishing possibilities in and around Copenhagen.


	28. Chapter 28

_ Four Years: Copenhagen _

The first few days are as close to a normal vacation as anything’s ever going to be for them.  Which is to say: Will leans heavily on breathing exercises to stave off an impending panic attack as they go through customs, Hannibal subjects Will to a long diatribe about airline food despite having packed lunches for both of them, they make their way to the vacation home rented under false names, and the first thing Will does after they drop their bags is to call the kennel to make sure Cavall’s upset stomach hasn’t caused any further trouble since they’d dropped the dogs off last night.

It’s near enough to normal, Will thinks with a sleepy sort of amused resignation, when he wakes up on the fourth day half-smothered under an especially-clingy sleeping Hannibal.  Just close enough that he can vaguely see normal in the distance somewhere.

They’ve explored the city on foot and in their rented car - less flashy than Hannibal’s rentals tend to be, and Will’s letting himself postpone thinking about why that might be - exploring side streets and art galleries and coffee shops.  Their opera tickets are for this evening and Will’s suit, wretched finery that still doesn’t feel as comfortable as Hannibal claims a well-tailored suit should, is hanging in the closet awaiting the occasion.  He briefly considers contriving to spill something on it, but knows perfectly well after all this time that Hannibal’s response will be a swift trip to the nearest acceptable clothing store.  A brand-new uncomfortable suit with a tailoring bill to match plus a dry-cleaning bill for the old one won’t make him enjoy dressing up any more, so he dismisses that idea.

Since the evening is given over to Hannibal’s preferred pastime, Will has his choice for the day’s activities.  There are options, he considers idly without moving, reluctant to leave their warm bed just yet.  He still wants to rent a boat: a proper one, not one of the ridiculous little gondolas that roam the canals.  He has his eye on a trip to  Dragør to visit the seafaring museum.   And there’s always the option, taken perhaps a little too often during their travels, of spending the day in attempting, and happily failing, to get out of bed at all

Many very good options.  But after all, there’s a reason they’re in Copenhagen and it’s not just the charms of well-preserved fishing villages and well-trained baritones.  

Will manages to free an arm just enough to elbow Hannibal none-too-gently in the ribs.  Hannibal doesn’t quite wake up, and makes a vague grumbling sound, but does at least roll sideways enough for Will to get up.  He forgoes a shower for the moment in hopes of a shared shower later, but does brush his teeth and go to make coffee.  The rental house has a fairly terrible coffeemaker, but bad coffee always reminds him of the mornings in that hotel in Boston, their first re-meeting after all those months apart.  So he makes the coffee with a smile, humming a vague tune under his breath.

He pads back into the bedroom balancing two cups and sets them both on his bedside table before climbing back into bed, nudging Hannibal gently but persistently into wakefulness with apologies and kisses and promises of semi-drinkable coffee.  The apologies aren’t accepted, but the kisses and the coffee are, and eventually he’s coaxed Hannibal upright and awake, rumpled and frankly adorable although Will opts not to horrify Hannibal by using that word aloud to describe him.

They sit quietly together and work their way through the coffee, with gentle touches and some idle discussion about the opera.  Eventually Will deems Hannibal awake enough for actual conversation and informs him of the plans for the day.

That turns out to be enough to get Hannibal awake and out of bed, and Will gets the joint shower he’d been angling for.  All in all, it’s a successful morning.

*************

The day’s agenda comes together over brunch in the vague, elliptical sort of way necessary for public conversation.  Hannibal’s research (and Will’s own later follow-up, during which he determined that Hannibal’s cherry-picking of information hadn’t been so extreme as to change Will’s mind about anything) had included a current address.  The first item of business is simply to determine where the house might be, and who else might live there.  Reconnaissance.  Window shopping.  Nothing that would commit them so far that they couldn’t just walk away and enjoy the rest of their vacation and go home to their dogs.

Nothing except the rapid-fire metronome of Will’s pulse and the way Hannibal looks at him during the conversation, like there’s nothing else in the world worth looking at.  A person could get lost entirely in a look like that. 

Will’s fairly sure none of Freddie’s minions are around this time - he’s keeping a careful watch now - but if they are, he supposes a photograph of that look on Hannibal’s face would boost her circulation numbers immeasurably.  She could slap a “murder honeymoon” headline on it and watch copies fly off the shelves.  Pity she won’t have the satisfaction, he thinks, without even the slightest bit of sincerity.

Planning about as done as it can be given the setting, Hannibal changes the topic abruptly to some biting commentary about the architecture of a church down the street.  Will attempts to keep up with the shift in topic but some part of his mind remains on their afternoon plans.  He supposes he’ll never be able to shift as as easily as Hannibal does, to plan terrible things and then set them aside in favor of observing the weather.  It’s not entirely a bad thing; it’s a reminder that he’s still himself, if perhaps a version of himself that older selves would have had a hard time recognizing.  

They finish up their meal and walk around the neighborhood a bit to stretch their legs and digest their food, peering idly in store windows, hands intertwined and Will acutely aware of the contact, before returning to the car.  And then they drive to a neighborhood they haven’t been to yet.  One with no particular tourist value; a nice little residential area you might only go to if you knew someone there. Or had some sort of business there.

Will drives around the block slowly enough for Hannibal to report on what he observes, but, he hopes, not so slowly as to look suspicious.  They loop around twice, just enough to be no more than plausibly lost, and then away.

Will drives at random after that, just  _ away _ , and glances over only once at Hannibal’s shining eyes meeting his expectantly.  He says, “Tell me,” and then turns his attention back to the road.

Hannibal closes his eyes for the telling; Will supposes he’s gone into his memory to be sure he reports accurately without distraction from outside stimuli.  “I didn’t see any cars,” he reports.  “And no lights on.  The front door is quite visible from the street but there’s a side entrance that’s harder to see from the road.  There could be a back entrance, too.  We could let ourselves in and wait.”

Will can see it clearly as any other design he ever imagined; Hannibal surely knows how to pick a lock, but if not, Will could get them inside.  They could wait inside, unseen and unheard, moving around by the ambient light through the windows.  They’ll wear gloves so they can trail their hands over objects unseen, go through the man’s belongings if they want.  Or maybe they’ll just stand quietly and wait, still and steady as fishing in the stream.  Will knows how to wait.

Hannibal continues, “I didn’t see any immediate signs of multiple people living there but it’s hard to tell from the outside.  It would be best to take him quickly.  We could bring the car around to the side and take him somewhere else, if we’re quick and careful.  Then we wouldn’t be rushed.”

No, Hannibal wouldn’t want to be  _ rushed _ for this.  Not after so long.  Will glances over at him again and then asks, “Back to the rental?”   It’s barely a question; there’s no other good reason for Hannibal to have chosen it, farther out from the city than Hannibal would typically select as their base of operations during travel.  But he wants to hear it.

“It would be the simplest option.  Secluded enough, and the garage would serve if we clear a few things out.  I can look for something else if you’d rather keep these activities separate from our temporary home.”

So  _ polite _ , Will’s half-tamed monster is.  A swell of fondness threatens to burst in his chest and all he can say is, “That’s… that seems fine.  You’re the expert.”  He takes a moment to get his bearings on where they are, and then turns the car toward the city limits and back toward their rental before adding, “So I guess that means we’re spending the afternoon clearing the garage.”

Hannibal shrugs and even the glimpse of it Will sees from the corner of his eye tells him it’s a more elegant motion than a shrug has any right to be.  He responds, “Not necessarily, if you’d rather not get dirty before our show tonight.  We could just relax for the afternoon.  We’ll go out tonight.  Tomorrow we can continue our other considerations.”

Will has some thoughts on that.  If the information about where Felix works now is still accurate, there may be something useful to be found by going to see him in that habitat.  But perhaps that can be a task for another day.  They have time, and no need to rush.  And there’s a fierce, dark pleasure in the drawn-out planning, so unlike any of the other times Will’s spilled blood.

They pass the afternoon peacefully in separate pursuits, Will reading and Hannibal drawing the canals they’d seen the day before, until it’s time to dress for dinner.  Their plans aren’t discussed again that day, even when Hannibal takes a long and wandering route home from the opera, one that takes them back through the same neighborhood they’ve visited earlier.  Will observes this time: one car in the driveway, two lights on, the flickering glow of a television.

He absently reaches out to rest a hand on Hannibal’s thigh and they drive the rest of the way back in companionable silence. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The good news, darlings, is that I am back from vacation so here is a chapter for you! Also a couple of little ficlet prompts got written while I was away and I'll be doling them out over the next few days.
> 
> The bad news is I seem to have con crud, which is making my head feel all fuzzy and cotton-wool-y. Every time I sit down to do any serious writing or editing my brain just kind of collapses into a sad mushy heap. So, I'm not sure precisely when the next chapter will be ready. Soon, I hope. I am resting and hydrating and all that good stuff in the hopes of speeding recovery along.
> 
> In the meanwhile, I do seem to have enough brainpower for the usual amount of silliness, meta, and general flailing about the unfairness of Mads Mikkelsen's face on [Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com), so feel free to check on me there for proof of my continued existence. 
> 
> With love, from the sick bay of Damn Slippy Planet Enterprises.

**Author's Note:**

> All right, darlings, let's get this show on the road. I think this one's gonna update Wednesdays and Saturdays, but you never know. Holiday season and all, I could be tempted to give you a occasional early update. I hope you enjoy the second chunk of what, I have just realized while typing this very sentence, I should have instead titled Fluff and Nonsense. Damn it. Is it too late?
> 
> It's probably too late. Oh, well. I adore your kudos and comments and also would love for you to come and play with me [over on Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com) if that's your jam.


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